Interesting; do you have a source for that? I'd have thought that it would be most useful for people on land, too, to have noon at a well-defined time.
It's not a question of moving noon around by hours, but moving noon around by minutes or seconds.
It's not sourced since it's what I remember off of navigational history. Whether solar noon is at 11:45 or 12:15 makes little difference for your personal life, but observing solar noon at 11:45 vs 12:15 is a difference of 1/48th the way around the globe longitudinally.
