Quirico Filopanti (the pen name of Italian mathematician and patriot Giuseppe Barilli, 1812–1894) was one of the first thinkers to sketch a modern, global system of time. In 1858, while living in London in exile after the Roman Republic fell, he published a book titled Miranda!that proposed dividing the Earth into twenty-four longitudinal “days,” what we would now call time zones.
Each zone would span 15 degrees of longitude, differ from its neighbor by one hour, and share the same minutes and seconds so that everyday coordination was simple and predictable. Alongside local times, Filopanti also proposed a single Universal Time for astronomy and telegraphy, a neutral reference clock to keep science and communications in step.
