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For most of human history, time was a local affair. Noon was when the sun sat highest in the sky, and every town lived by its own clock. Then, quietly and decisively, one place changed everything.

In this episode of Rearview Mirror Chronicles, we travel to Royal Observatory Greenwich, the unlikely hilltop that became the centre of global time. We explore how astronomers, clockmakers, sailors, and empire builders wrestled with the problem of longitude, why a single line drawn across a courtyard came to rule the world’s clocks, and how Greenwich Mean Time emerged not as a law of nature, but as a human agreement, fragile, contested, and revolutionary.

This is the story of precision and power, of pendulums and stars, of railways, navies, and modern life falling into sync. From sun dials to atomic seconds, from local noon to global coordination, Greenwich became the place where time itself was standardised.

Stand with one foot in the east and one in the west, and listen in, because this is the moment the world decided what time it really was.

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