The Snake checks the time

Our vociferous viper looks back at a long standing dispute between France and England

For the past couple of centuries an agreeable peace and mutual friendship has been maintained between Britain and France. Other than some aggressive behaviour by the commercial fisherman of each nation disputing territorial waters and a refusal by the French to import bacteria ridden British beef a few years ago, an amicable co-existence has flourished either side of The English Channel (or possibly even La Manche). There has been a mutually satisfying cultural exchange between the two nations: Britons can now cook decently and may even recognise a herb when they see one, while though much of France’s premier football talent currently plays in England, the French have joyfully embraced the serene pleasures of crowd violence. This represents a generous and selfless gift to mainland Europe by British sports fans keen to share their world-beating expertise in this field.

Furthermore, a linguistic exchange has proliferated between the two counties and some dignified and exciting French phrases have been directly transposed into the English language: sang-froid, hors d’oeuvre, panache, pain au chocolat, ménage à trois and soupe de poisson are a few, obvious examples. This enriching traffic has flowed in both directions and the French can now benefit from a number of elegant English derivatives: the useful ‘le parking,’ the essential ‘le shopping’ and the sensibly understandable ‘le weekend’ (the French equivalent of ‘dirty weekend’ has become ‘le weekend coquin’ – strange, when we were all lead to believe this exciting concept originated on the continent).

However, any perceptions of international intimacy are far from convincing when a tedious squabble between the two countries has been rumbling on for about two hundred years. This tiresome wrangle concerns Time and - more importantly - its measurement: as a philosopher remarked in 4th century BC; “Time is a measure of movement” (his words were actually; “Tempus est mensura motus rerum mobilium”… but what the hell). Time, though, held the secret to successful, accurate long distance navigation during a period when seafaring superiority equated directly to world domination. Thus, the mastery of this fluid, intricate dimension was vital. The resulting, historical obsession and rivalry with Time and its calculation has lead, ultimately, to the recent demise of the pure and noble GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) and the implementation of a hideously bureaucratic mongrel; UTC.

UTC has officially replaced GMT as the abbreviation for civil time; a decision based upon removing the measurement of Time from a fixed geographical location and finding a solution to the inherent inaccuracies of GMT. Admittedly, the precision of GMT was far from exact as the method was based on recording noon as the time when the sun reaches its highest point above the prime meridian of geographical longitude, 0º, in Greenwich, London. This technique was incapable of adjusting to the earth’s gradual reduction in speed of rotation caused by the effects of the moon and tides and further variations due to the planet’s elliptic orbit - problems that are overcome by UTC. The new system is a combination of two timekeeping systems (readers of The Daily Sail who develop a throbbing headache or a blinding pain behind the eyes when confronted with science should swiftly move on two paragraphs):

International Atomic Time (TAI)*; determined by the reconciliation of differences between a collection of atomic clocks maintained around the world and administered by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM)*.

and

Universal Time (UT1); based on the earth’s daily rotation. To compensate for a reduction in the speed of rotation resulting in longer days, leap seconds are issued by the International Earth Rotation Service (possibly administered by the Thunderbirds team) approximately every 18 months on 30th June or 31st December when one second is added at 23:59: 60 before clocks can change to 00:00:00. This ensures that UTC remains within 0.9 seconds of UT1.

*(a revealing list of confusing time-based acronyms is included at the end of this column)

UTC, though, is not a true abbreviation but a derivative of UT1 and a compromise between the British preference CUT (Co-ordinated Universal Time) and the French choice TUC (Temps Universel Coordonné), implemented by the BIPM in an attempt to avoid any international, academic sulking. This is not a recent scientific quarrel and stems from a historic rivalry between the Royal Observatory at Greenwich and the Paris Observatory; an antagonism that reached its peak in the 18th century when an Englishman, John Harrison (1693-1776), finally solved the problem of longitude with his chronometer H4. This invention quickly thrust Greenwich into the scientific spotlight and enabled Captain James Cook to immediately sail off around the world discovering and accurately mapping – amongst other things – many of the planet’s most righteous surfing spots.

The ensuing, scholarly smugness in Britain must have been unendurable for French scientists and resulted in some fairly unhealthy denial over Time and the prime meridian’s location; a situation reflected most vividly by contemporary chart making practices. During this period charts used by merchant and naval ships used a wide range of geographical points on the globe as the prime meridian and the basis for navigational calculations: the Canary Islands were a popular location along with Rome, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, St. Petersburg, the Cape Verde Islands as well as Greenwich and Paris. This variety lead to confusion and charts printed in England showed Greenwich as 0º longitude, while charts produced in France would use Paris as prime meridian. The French further complicated navigation by publishing charts showing degrees of longitude with Paris as prime meridian along the upper edge of the chart and degrees of longitude measured from a different 0º location along the lower border which may - in a ‘two-for-one’ way - have seemed like a bargain but must have caused confusion. Indeed, The Snake owns a French chart of the Cape Verde Islands, printed in the late 18th century, which uses exactly this method although the chart’s ‘Ingénieur Hydrographe de la Marine,’ a Monsieur M. Bonne, seems to have been more concerned with the precise location of the archipelago’s leper colonies than any accurate mapping of the coastline and anchorages.

In 1884, to bring order to this chaos, President Chester A. Arthur of The United States organised The International Meridian Conference held in Washington DC and, finally, the definitive location of the prime meridian was agreed upon…almost. Twenty-five nations were represented at Chester’s conference; twenty-two countries voted favouring Greenwich as the site of 0º of longitude, while France and Brazil abstained and the delegate from Saint-Domingue voted against the proposal. Now, it is always challenging to guess what is going on in a Brazilian’s head, but working out the agenda of Monsieur de Galvan from the former French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) is slightly less complicated. Although this democratic process should have resolved this tricky issue, France continued to use Paris as prime meridian until 1911 and such was the French antipathy towards Greenwich that GMT was often referred to as “Paris Mean Time retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds.”

It is now evident that subtly ‘playing the long game’ has paid-off for the French scientific community and GMT will join all the many other fine, defunct British institutions; the pith helmet, the workhouse, badger baiting….etc., etc. It is also distressing to note that similar, surreptitious French tactics have traditionally rendered many British men incapable of operating confidently in the kitchen and the bedroom. However, plucky British boffins and bureaucrats are still prepared to skirmish savagely, for in 2002 the French name of the sea area west of the Bay of Biscay, formerly known as Finisterre in the British Shipping Forecast, was abruptly changed to Fitzroy. Ostensibly this re-naming was to honour Captain Robert Fitzroy who, in 1854, became the first director of the British Meteorological Office, but…….

Conspiracy theories aside…there do seem to be some dark forces at work. Or as they might put it in France; “Il y a quelque chose de pas catholique là dessous!”

Some international abbreviations illustrating the French obsession with Time:

	English	French
BIPM	International Bureau of Weights and Measures	Bureau International des Poids et Mesures
TAI	International Atomic Time	Temps Atomique International
TCG	Geocentric Co-ordinated Time	Temps Coordonné Géocentrique
EAL	Free Atomic Time	Échelle Atomique Libre
PHARAO	Atomic Clock Frequency	Projet d’Horloge Atomique à Refroidissement d’Atomes en Orbite