September 26, 2023 Dateline: Greenwich

The Liberty Gazette

September 26, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: The impetus for a brief respite in England was to see the ancestral home of the Elys. That is, Ely, England. We built the whole trip around the one day we would spend in the small town with the giant cathedral. More on that in another episode. For starters, we knew better than to expect we’d have a ton of energy to do much our first day after an overnight flight, so we planned it light and leisurely. Arrive at Heathrow about 12:30 in the afternoon, catch the Heathrow Express across London to Greenwich, and do something touristy: straddle the Prime Meridian, so we can say we had one foot in each hemisphere at the same time. It’s the line of 0 degrees longitude, so it splits the earth from north to south, delineating the east and west. 

Flying is among the professions that use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as a standard of reference. We use it for filing flight plans, getting weather reports and forecasts, and other tasks and communications. Wherever you are in the world, your location is measured from this position; you’re either east or west of the Prime Meridian. So, there we stood, at the center of time. Almost.

Mike: According to Royal Museums Greenwich (www.rmg.co.uk), the location for the original zero-longitude line was voted on by 23 nations in 1884. Before that, almost every town in the world kept its own local time. There was no international agreement on how time should be measured, when a day would begin and end, or even the length of an hour. By the mid-19th century, railways and communications networks were expanding, making an international standard for time absolutely necessary. Greenwich was selected because the U.S. had already decided to base our national time zone system on it, plus, observations made from there gave astronomers the ability to map the sky. That was important in a time when the vast majority of the world’s commerce moved by boat, meaning shipment of most goods was dependent on sea charts and sailors who could navigate by them.

A century later, after more precise measuring (by satellite) was available, the line was moved. The “true” Prime Meridian is only a bit more than the length of a football field to the east of the original line.

Linda: There’s an observatory, a museum, and a beautiful park in the lovely village of Greenwich. If you search the web for photos of the Prime Meridian, you’ll mostly find pictures of a thick brass line on concrete. That’s just outside the observatory and museum, on the back patio where you exit after touring the displays inside. The cost is £18 per person. But if you don’t intend to go inside, it’s easy enough to find the continuation of the line in the park below the observatory. It doesn’t cost a dime to straddle that, and you’ll have a few pounds saved for a pint at the Greenwich Tavern across the street.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com