On Tue 2019-03-05T15:44:27-0500 Donald MacQueen hath writ:
Timeanddate.com says that UTC was a compromise between English and French speakers.
There is no contemporary evidence to support this myth. By the 1950s various radio broadcast time signals were using different expressions to correct the raw time observations to a more uniform and smooth time scale. In a pattern repeated over decades of history, any differences of broadcast time signals were deemed intolerable and demanded immediate changes even if the mechanisms for those changes were not specified and not tested in actual use. At Dublin in 1955 the IAU decreed that everyone should use the same expressions and that all broadcasts should be the seasonally smoothed version. In publications of the time service bureaus the three versions of UT acquired the names English UT0, UT1, UT2 French TU0, TU1, TU2 both sets used with and without embedded full stop (.) characters. Every indication from the literature over time is that the three variations of Universal Time which were decided at IAU 1955 evolved along the same pattern to become TUC and UTC. (The person who first used "TUC" in print later explicitly disavowed having invented that notation.) Then in the 1970s came the era when various agencies recommended use of a single abbreviation without embedded periods. -- Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB 260 Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 1156 High Street Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m