How To Find the Correct Time in Other Countries

To know the correct time has always been important; but recently, “accurate time” has taken on a new dimension, as atomic clocks are accurate to a fraction of a second.

The world has become a small place with travel, marketing and business contacts spilling over borders. It is therefore very important to be able to know the correct time in another country, whether for the purpose of setting up a travel itinerary, a business virtual meeting or making a simple phone call home. Many businesses have offices in more than one country, and families are constantly on the move; so there is a very real need to synchronize clocks across the world for families and businesses to connect seamlessly and at the correct time for both.

Sometimes, making a phone call to another country can create problems if the time differences are not taken into account. I called my mother in England one night and woke the poor woman at 4 o'clock in the morning! Mothers are forgiving, but others may not be as understanding; so it is best to check the correct time in another country before putting that phone call through. I have found that there is no better way to find the correct time anywhere in the world than to download a program written for just that purpose.

Time zones are parallel to the "Lines of Longitude". These are imaginary lines running from north to south and help us find the accurate time anywhere on Earth as long as we know the coordinates. “Time” starts at the Prime Meridian, which runs through Greenwich near London, England; this is also where East and West actually meet. The GMT or Greenwich Mean Time is a baseline when we want to find the correct time in any country on the globe. For example, EST in the USA is –5 GMT and Bogotá is -5 GMT; they are on the same line of longitude and in the same time zone.

There have always been equations and formulas to compute the time in any country, but software freely available on the Internet make it simpler to find the correct time anywhere in the world. Some websites maintain a database of the correct time in many countries and will also convert time to and from different time zones; mobile versions of the programs make it easy to keep accurate time for those on the go.

Besides being dependable, the atomic clock corrects itself regularly and is accurate to a tenth of a fraction of a second. For me, the perfect answer was software of the atomic sync clock on my computer giving me the right time, every time. I have not awoken anyone at 4 o’clock in the morning since I started using it.