In a message dated 3/23/2001 8:48:17 AM Eastern Standard Time, [log in to unmask] writes: << very interesting since a uniform acurate time did not come into being until the development of the railroad, requiring a consistant standard time from town to town (the converison from half past noon to 12:23) >> AH HAH!!!!!! At last I've got you all where I want you. You have stepped PRECISELY into my cleverly laid trap: If you look in the almanac, you will see that the earth rotates on its axis once in 23 hours, 56 minutes, and a few seconds. However, as we all know, the day is 24 hours long. So what happens to the four minutes???? One possibility is that the 23:56 are divided into 24 equal parts; however, if that were the case, we wouldn't know about the 4 minutes. On the other hand, if every day ended 4 minutes early, but the clocks kept running, we would eventually have noon in the middle of the night, but that doesn't happen. The answer--whatever it is, and I don't know it either, and nobody's ever adequately explained it to me despite having asked this question intermittently for 20 years--is NOT leap year, which is a function of the orbit of the earth around the sun (and the accumulation of 4 minutes per day over the course of four years doesn't work out to 1 day, either.) So if all you Pinheads are so smart, what happens to the 4 minutes???????? And if you pinheads aren't so smart, you can ask the engineer with his structurally unsound mortise and tenons. Ralph Ralph