This editorial seems to assume that clocks were more or less synchronous prior to the introduction of time zones -- this is completely false. Time zones were in

This editorial seems to assume that clocks were more or less synchronous prior to the introduction of time zones -- this is completely false. Time zones were introduced (at the behest of the railroads in the U.S.) because communities had their own local mean time, and often those communities were not distant from one another. In other words, there were an indeterminate number of time zones worldwide. The current time zone map, for all of its peculiarities, is hardly difficult for people to grasp: it gets light in the early hours, etc. China has a single time zone for the entire country--perhaps the author expects a Maoist ``harmonization dividend'' worldwide but speaking to Chinese friends over the years I'm not convinced that such a happy dividend ever materialized there.