time. This meant that if it was 12:00 in Helsinki, the local times in other localities would range from 11:40.02 in Mariehamn, Åland, to 12:10.53 in Kuopio, North Savo. The railway required more precise timetables than earlier means of transport, such as sailing ships and stage-coaches. The telegraph, which allowed near real-time communication, also made it inconvenient for each location to observe its own solar time. The first railway line in Finland (the Hämeenlinna–Helsinki railway) was inaugurated in 1862. Its timetables were noted in a common mean time, measured at the Helsinki University Observatory from the mean time of UTC+01:39:49.2, known as "Helsinki time". A ball was released at noon and its falling was noted optically at the railway station and the clock adjusted accordingly. If it was raining, which would prevent the ball from being seen from that far away, noon would additionally be announced by a shot from a cannon. The correct time was relayed to the other stations via electrical telegraph, which had been introduced in Finland in 1854. On the Riihimäki–Saint Petersburg railway, inaugurated in 1870, Helsinki time was used as far as Kaipiainen, just east of Kouvola. In 1882, clock synchronisations to Helsinki time by telephone were arranged between the Finnish Meteorological Institute and Sweden's National Meteorological Institute in order to conveniently conduct geomagnetic measurements. The International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C. in October 1884 divided the world into 24 meridians, each one covering 15 degrees of longitude. Each meridian had an hourly offset from Greenwich Mean Time in the United Kingdom (which was agreed to be the prime meridian at the conference), ranging from GMT−12:00 to the west to GMT+12:00 to the east. However this was not immediately implemented in most countries, including Finland. In October 1893, most of the railways in Europe adopted the offsets GMT (also named Western European Time), GMT+01:00 (Middle European Time or Central European Time) and GMT+02:00 (Eastern European Time). The implementation of this was overseen by the American Railway Association. Between 1893 and 1895, several countries in Europe adopted standard times that corresponded with one of these three time zones, but Finland did not. In 1888, the Diet of Finland asked Emperor Alexander III of Russia (Finland was at this time an autonomous part of the Russian Empire) for Helsinki time to be established as standard throughout Finland. Alexander thought it was enough that the railways had