The story of how the Prime Meridian was chosen has a similar flavor of controversy. There was a conference in 1884 to decide where it would be, and a large portion of the discussion concerned France's opinion that it should be in a neutral place, not cutting any continent or major population center.
France wanted it to go through the Bering Strait or the Azores, and made the argument that the SI meter (introduced nearly 100 years before) was a truly neutral measure, being based on one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Other delegates answered that its is still a French system, because it was France that took the measurement and introduced French error into it.
Ultimately practical concerns won out, as 70% of the world's shipping and charts were already using Greenwich as the meridian, and for any other place to truly be a meridian there would need to be an observatory there with telegraph links to the rest of the world.
Another gem is the part where the Spanish delegate expressed that he had been authorized to vote for Greenwich as the meridian, but was doing so in the hope that England and the United States will accept the metric system. The president replies that this is outside the scope of the conference, to which the Spanish delegate replies that they know this, and anyway protocol doesn't allow them to vote on "hopes" anyway, but he just needed to say it.
Although Greenwich was chosen, France was a holdout and didn't adopt it until 1911, and even then did not call it "Greenwich Time", but rather "Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and 21 seconds." This was their official designation until they adopted UTC. The UK on the other hand still calls their time GMT legally, even though they are actually using UTC now, which is not precisely the same as GMT!
One of my favorite useless facts is that the Prime Meridian of Mars was defined and that definition was universally accepted decades before there was agreement on where to put Earth's Prime Meridian. Goes to show how much easier it is to get things done when you don't have to worry about international pissing contests and people's preexisting biases.
Where did you get this idea, not to mention the confidence to repeat it authoritatively? It's the opposite of correct: not only is this NOT true (GMT does NOT have daylight savings time or spring forward/fall back at any point during the year) but there are other differences between GMT and UTC as well.
The difference is in fraction of seconds, from the parent link:
> The term GMT is now more commonly used to refer to the time zone at the prime meridian (0° longitude), in which case it is being used as a local representation of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and not UT1. However, UTC is adjusted with leap seconds to always be within less than one second of UT1, so either use of GMT can be considered equivalent to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) when fractions of a second are not important.
Never use software that thinks in terms of lists of +/- GMT zones and says things like "GMT: Ireland, United Kingdom; Iceland". You don't live in a "GMT Time Zone" and nobody you know has any idea what this means.
Use software which is driven by cities and uses the Olson database, Europe/London, Europe/Dublin and so on. This is unambiguous which means things will go wrong a lot less often.
You probably live in a city, and if you don't live in a city you there's a big one near you. You know what time it is there. Everybody knows what time it is there. If you're participating in an event where some people are far away they can do any number of things to find out when "14:00 Dublin time" is exactly and get it correct. They can even just call somebody in Dublin and ask. No confusion about "Um, GMT. I think? Is the timezone GMT? Or UTC? Or does it change?"
France wanted it to go through the Bering Strait or the Azores, and made the argument that the SI meter (introduced nearly 100 years before) was a truly neutral measure, being based on one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole. Other delegates answered that its is still a French system, because it was France that took the measurement and introduced French error into it.
Ultimately practical concerns won out, as 70% of the world's shipping and charts were already using Greenwich as the meridian, and for any other place to truly be a meridian there would need to be an observatory there with telegraph links to the rest of the world.
Another gem is the part where the Spanish delegate expressed that he had been authorized to vote for Greenwich as the meridian, but was doing so in the hope that England and the United States will accept the metric system. The president replies that this is outside the scope of the conference, to which the Spanish delegate replies that they know this, and anyway protocol doesn't allow them to vote on "hopes" anyway, but he just needed to say it.
Although Greenwich was chosen, France was a holdout and didn't adopt it until 1911, and even then did not call it "Greenwich Time", but rather "Paris Mean Time retarded by nine minutes and 21 seconds." This was their official designation until they adopted UTC. The UK on the other hand still calls their time GMT legally, even though they are actually using UTC now, which is not precisely the same as GMT!
The proceedings make for some entertaining and enlightening reading: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17759/17759-h/17759-h.htm