At a Quarter Past R

Global thinkers will have to use global time if they are ever going to keep their dates straight. The difficulty: the day starts at different hours for each of the world's 24 standard time zones; when it is after 5 p.m., March 31 in New York, it is already April 1 in Moscow. This week Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, global-thinking president of the Pan-European Union, offered a solution to the Secretary General of the United Nations. He calls it UNO-time.

UNO-time is an alphabetical variation of Greenwich Civil Time, a global time system used by navigators since the adoption of the International Date Line in 1884. G.C.T. runs for 24 hours, and is based on the position of the sun in relation to the prime meridian (Longitude 00DEG 00' 00") which passes through Greenwich, England.

Local time is based on the sun's position in relation to 24 "standard" meridians which lie at intervals of approximately 15DEG longitude around the earth. Thus when the sun is directly overhead at Greenwich, G.C.T. and local time are both 12 o'clock noon. At the same instant it is 7 a.m. local time--Eastern Standard--in New York, but the chronometer of a ship in the harbor will read -- with corrections -- 12h oom oos G.C.T., though the sun may be only just rising. The Court's suggestion: substitute the 24 letters of the Latin Alphabet for the 24 G.C.T. hours. Then at a quarter past R in San Francisco, it would also be a quarter past R in Chungking--and no one would be confused. (Says the Count.)

Count Coudenhove-Kalergi is sure that "people would become accustomed to following in their minds the course of the sun around the world and to realizing the beginning and the end of every world day. ... (It) would serve to mark the fact that we are all living in one world of mutual interdependence."

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