Watched Days

On 13 October 1884 the world voted on where the day begins.

The International Meridian Conference met in Washington and picked the meridian at Greenwich by 22 votes to 1. San Domingo voted no. France and Brazil abstained. France then held out on the name: it kept Paris time until 1911, and even after that its official phrase was not “Greenwich” but “Paris mean time, retarded by 9 minutes and 21 seconds,” until 1978.

The neutral fallback lost too. A proposal to choose a meridian cutting through no continent was voted down 21 to 3.

And the conference never adopted time zones at all, which half of us assume it did.

Voting took place on 13 October 1884; the resolutions were adopted on 22 October.

Source: Wikipedia, International Meridian Conference, checked 13 October 2026.