Greenwich Observatory Laid: Time Gets a Standard
King Charles II laid the foundation stone for the Royal Observatory at Greenwich on August 10, 1675, commissioning John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal with a salary of 100 pounds per year and no budget for instruments. Flamsteed had to provide his own. The observatory's purpose was solving the longitude problem: without accurate star charts, ships couldn't determine their east-west position at sea, leading to catastrophic navigation errors and shipwrecks. Greenwich eventually became the reference point for global timekeeping when the International Meridian Conference of 1884 established the Prime Meridian at 0 degrees longitude through the observatory. Every time zone on Earth is measured from this building.
August 10, 1675
351 years ago
Key Figures & Places
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