Did you know that it takes 26 hours for everyone on Earth to enter the New Year?
There is a total of 38 different local times in use around the world. The first places to enter the new year are Samoa and Christmas Island, Kiribati (GMT+14) while most of U.S. minor outlying islands are the last to enter the new year.
In 1879, Scottish-born Canadian Sir Sandford Fleming proposed a worldwide system of time zones. The universal day would begin at the anti-meridian of Greenwich, London (180th meridian, which is the circle of constant longitude passing through a given place on the earth's surface and the terrestrial poles).
In October 1884, the International Meridian Conference established the Greenwich Meridian as the prime meridian and Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the world’s time standard. A universal day of 24 hours beginning at Greenwich midnight was also adopted. The international 24-hour time-zone system was developed from this, and all zones are referenced to the GMT.
It took decades before all time on Earth was in the form of time zones that were referred to some "standard offset" from GMT, as opposed to the standard time zones that will differ by 4 minutes for every degree change in longitude. By 1929, most major countries had adopted hourly time zones, with Nepal being the last country to adopt a standard offset in 1956, shifting slightly to GMT+5:45
