This guy should have done a little research. The Brits weren't just given the honour for GMT. The Brits invented the portable time-piece that enabled global navigation, using a spring instead of pendulum. They were the ONLY nation with reliable navigation, already using GMT until the other nations copied the tech. That's why GMT was acknowledged as the zero meridian by all the other nations.

JPS shitting on France is the most British thing he’s ever done. 😂

And JPS saying “oh the US just gave it to the Brits” is the most American thing he has ever done.

He truely is the son of two countries.

I thought it was to do with the fact that the Brits, actually been the ones to work out how to ascertain the longitude of any place, quickly and easily. They, ( John Harrison) invented the chronometer for accurate time keeping on board a ship, and the Royal observatory (Neville Maskilin) came up with the chart of astronomical observations to do the same. The chronometer allowed any ship's captain anywhere in the world to be able to know what time it was in London, all he had to do was observe local noon time and work out how many hours, minutes and seconds behind or in front of London time, to work out his ships longitude. Greenwich was chosen as recognition of the fact that without British invention and ingenuity ships would still be piling up on shores left right and centre. Just another simple thing that effects every living soul on this planet bought to you by the British, so next time you board a jet, remember your flying on a British system of navigation and the engines driving it were invented by them to. In today's world its very popular to rag out the British Empire, to tear down statues, but the morons doing it don’t give a thought for their own debt to that very Empire, and the effects that the British Empire has had directly on all of our lives, from penicillin, the end of slavery, the telegraph or television, Insurance or modern banking, the jet engine or radar, it's the British who bought it to you. So if you have a stainless steel pin or plate, you owe the British, if you ever survived an infection thank the British for the antibiotics, never had small pox or cholera thank Britain, and if you're of African descent and free not in slavery, it's the British you should thank for that freedom.

The world had to standardise time to best use the trains that the British gave to you all, you are welcome Joel.

Bh the way, the British invented trains and railways. The Longitude Clock was made by a Brit. Britain made the modern world.

Greenwich Mean Time was first introduced in 1825 and adopted by the railways in Britain in 1847 to standardise the timetables across the country, the conference in 1884 was not about US railway timetables it was the International Meridian Conference which was involved with the much broader consideration of a single meridian point for the world as a whole, whilst the conference was held in the USA it was the British GMT that was adopted so contrary to the American perspective given here Britain gave the world GMT.

As Al Murray told us...." Great Britain is the centre of the world because.... WE put the line there !"
JOHN FLAMSTEAD came up with a formula for converting solar time to mean time in1670.
That's where we get GMT from. GREENWICH MEAN TIME .

Let's not forget that John Harrison (a Yorkshire man) invented the very first accurate marine time keeper, before that, people relied on celestial navigation, not very reliable at all. Could you do a reaction to his life story, it's really fascinating 👍👍👍

As a proud Londoner and someone who was born in Greenwich. We were always lead to believe that GMT was the scientific solution to sea navigation and general time from the 1700s onwards. It was not agreed at a conference in 1884. Maybe it was agreed that it was to be the standard from which world wide time was based in 1884, but we had a lot of the pre-eminent thknkers of the time and this group of islands were a major power back then as well. This expanded across the world via our empire at the time as we exported this along with other expertise so the world could catch up.

Nice one Joel.
Britain had worked out longitudes and the Greenwich time system and spread it across the globe 150 years before the USA had a navy. (The”New Navy” was created in 1884, I believe.) It was then that USA realised it needed to comply with the British organisation of world time, so called a meeting for important countries to agree with each other about what the world had already been doing for several generations. Thanks for the acknowledgement, USA! 👍

i think  that the creation of the marine chronometer, which made the calculation of global longitude possible being in this country gave some weight to the argument for putting the line here. we also introduced the world to railway timetables by the way.

Wow Joel, you’re getting the hang of British/Australian sarcasm. “Let’s give it to the Brits.” I love it.
Btw Greenwich Mean Time was adopted in 1847.

Us Brits also invented trains by the way

Of course we all know it's centre and not center ;-)

I like the fact Britain tells all nations… it’s time to sleep n eat 😂

I've been to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, and did the usual tourist thing of straddling the Prime Meridian, and have the photo to prove it! It was actually a very interesting visit, and I learnt a lot that seems obvious now but wasn't so obvious at the time - such as, how time is measured. If you ever visit the UK again, I'd definitely recommend paying the Royal Observatory a visit.

John Flamsteed, (1646-1719) was an English man and the first Astronomer Royal and director of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich from 1675 after he came up with the formula for converting solar time to mean time, and published a set of conversion tables in the early 1670s. Soon after, King Charles II, appointed John Flamsteed as the first Astronomer Royal and he moved into the new Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the name for mean solar time of the longitude (0°) of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in England. The meridian at this longitude is called the prime meridian or Greenwich meridian.
A need for time tables was soon realised when railways first came into public use. In 1848 George Stephenson (deceased) was called ‘the father of the railways’, though that accolade has been challenged because there were other engineers involved in the development of the world’s first railway system. The most notable was Robert Trevithick, a Cornishman, who in 1803 built the first steam locomotive to run on rails The first railway line in the world dates back to 1825, when George Stephenson connected the towns of Stockton and Darlington in England by rail.
Greenwich Mean Time was adopted across the island of Great Britain by the Railway Clearing House in 1847, and by almost all railway companies the following year, from which the term "railway time" is derived.
Sir Sanford Fleming, a Canadian engineer, was the first person to propose the use of worldwide time zones back in 1878. His idea was to divide the world into 24 time zones that were each 15 degrees of longitude apart. The reason for this is that the earth rotates 15 degrees every hour, or 360 degrees in 24 hours.  There were two main reasons for the choice. The first was the fact that in 1884, the USA had already chosen Greenwich as the basis for its own national time zone system. The second was that in the late 19th century, 72% of the world's commerce depended on sea-charts which used Greenwich as the Prime Meridian

It had to be Britain or France to make the international date line in the centre of the Pacific where there are no major land masses, so 1 country doesn't have 2 dates to cope with

Sir Sandford Fleming FRSC KCMG (January 7, 1827 – July 22, 1915) was a Scottish Canadian engineer and inventor. Born and raised in Scotland, he emigrated to colonial Canada at the age of 18. He promoted worldwide standard time zones, a prime meridian, and use of the 24-hour clock as key elements to communicating the accurate time, all of which influenced the creation of Coordinated Universal Time.[1] He designed Canada's first postage stamp, produced a great deal of work in the fields of land surveying and map making, engineered much of the Intercolonial Railway and the first several hundred kilometers of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and was a founding member of the Royal Society of Canada and founder of the Canadian Institute (a science organization in Toronto).

The Great Western Railway were the fist company to apply a standardised time to to their stations in 1840, 41 years before Chester Arthur became president. "Railway time" was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following seven years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the time station clocks displayed were brought in line with the local mean time for London or "London Time", the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory, which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time.