The Sun Never Set on the British Empire ...

The sun never set on the British Empire because the sun sets in the West and the British Empire was in the East.

Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday. Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget! Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional," 1897



Below is a 81.9K animated GIF file. In older computers, it may take a while to load, though individual frames should display during loading; and then, as the file runs, it may slow down the response of your computer for scrolling and other functions, even when the browser is minimized and other programs are used. Note that Los Angeles, the home of The Proceedings of the Friesian School, is in the same time zone as Vancouver (GMT -8).



Not all British possessions are listed in the image, only representative ones for each of the 24 time zones of the Earth. (All British possessions are listed below.) The time zones themselves may be said to be artifacts of the British Empire, since they are based on the Meridian of Greenwich (at the original Royal Observatory, 1675-1953, in London), which since 1884 is the internationally accepted prime meridian for the calculation of longitude. The animation may also be used to inspect the operation of the International Dateline, which divides the -12h/+12h time zone. It is interesting to note that although several places in the Pacific might fall into the -12h time zone, the Dateline itself and the boundaries of the -11h zone are today drawn in such a way that no jurisdiction uses the -12h zone (Tonga, formerly British, uses +12h; Midway Island & the Aleutians use -11h). Some time zone boundaries have been changed since 1937. Gambia no longer seems to be in the -1h time zone. Also, there have been several time zones that are at a half hour rather than a whole hour interval from Greenwich, including today India (+5h30m), Burma (+6h30m), and central Australia (+9h30m). My source for the 1937 zones (in the Atlas of the British Empire, edited by Christopher Bayly, Facts on File, 1989, p.246) does not clearly indicate these variations, so no attempt is made to represent them.