Thread by @Ash_Stewart_

The existence of "Gulf Standard Time" has irked people in the UAE for decades. Mostly because 6 countries form the Gulf and only 2 use this time zone. The rest use Arabia Standard Time.
So - why does it exist at all?

I found the man who invented it one night when he was 'tired'

.@SultanAlQassemi perhaps said it best.

On GST: “I keep getting invitations to events at Gulf Standard Time, and I end up having to Google it and figure out what that is.

“It’s a false reality, it does not exist, there is no such thing. Someone needs to put an end to this.”

Actually, it was Bahrain that set the wheels in motion for the standardisation of time zones in the region in 1940

According to historical info, there were two time zones commonly in use in Bahrain at the time: Greenwich Mean Time +3.5 and, extraordinarily, GMT +3 & 23 minutes

In November 1940, the British political agent in Manama set about standardising the time.

He wrote to the country's main companies asking which time they kept - the answers were split

So - the country's airways, petroleum company, banks etc were often operating 7 minutes apart

Bahraini time was eventually standardised. There were then 6/7 time zones across the region. But later, only two time zones remained. These are Gulf Standard Time (GMT +4, the UAE & Oman) and Arabia Standard Time (GMT +3, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Yemen).

But how did those names come into existence? And why does GST only apply to two Gulf countries?

It turns out the name for Gulf Standard Time was likely invented by an American computer scientist.

Paul Eggert, now a senior lecturer at the University of California, to be exact.

In the 1990s, Eggert helped create the TZ database in the US. It partitioned and compiled information about time zones worldwide for use in computers and, up until today, it is followed by some of the biggest global software systems, including Android, Java, iOS and Microsoft.

Information about local time in the UAE, along with several other countries, was added to the database by Eggert in 1993.

The database's operating system required a “time zone name or abbreviation” to represent each country.

So, Eggert invented GST - right then and there

Eggert says, of coming up with the name that has irked academics for years: “What can I say, it was probably late at night in the early 1990s and I was tired. I had to put some alphabetic acronym into the database, so I invented GST."

“Bahrain and Qatar observed GST from 1920 to 1972, as did the Dhahran airport (Saudi Arabia) for a while, so the abbreviation was not completely outlandish.”

Read about this, and more - including about how time zones could be different a few km down a road in Saudi Arabia, if you were behind a mountain - in this story here:

thenational.ae/arts-culture/w…

This is my favourite anecdote, maybe ever:

“Just how complicated this could be was illustrated a couple of years back when an English lady of long residence in Jeddah sat down to write three invitations to a summer dinner party.

"One going to a Saudi merchant, began ‘My husband and I would like you to join us for dinner at 12.30pm'. Another, going to an airline pilot, read ‘... for dinner at 8pm’. The third, to an American businessman, said ‘... dinner at 6.30pm’."

“Yet, just after sunset on the appointed evening, all 3 guests, each with a wristwatch showing a different hour, arrived within minutes of each other, dined well and later spent a leisurely evening chatting beside a lighted swimming pool...

.... thanks to the cleverness of a hostess who knew that being on time depended very much on whose watch you were watching.”