Uncle Sam Regulates Clocks, Time By Fixed Star

1903

HOW TIME IN THE U.S. IS MADE.

Our Uncle Samuel Always Regulates His Clocks by a Fixed Star.

Strange as it may seem, Uncle Sam does not make use of the sun for reckoning time, but, as already described in St. Nicholas, he turns his attention to some of the regular, steady-going stars, or "fixed stars," as they are called.

Every clear night an astronomer with a big telescope looks at certain of these stars and makes his calculations, from which he can tell just when the sun would cross the seventy-fifth meridian. One of the great clocks in the observatory is called the transmitter or sends out the signal that keeps standard time. This clock is set and regulated by the star time, and then every day at three minutes and fifteen seconds before 12 a switch is turned on and the beats of the pendulum of this clock are sent by electricity over the wires to the telegraph offices in Washington and New York.

When the telegraph operators hear this sound on their instruments they know that the noon signal is about to be sent out, and they at once begin to connect the telegraph wires with other towns and cities, until in a minute or two the "tick, tick" of the clock at Washington is heard in hundreds of telegraph offices. The beats stop at ten seconds before 12 as a notice that the next "tick" will be the noon signal, and so as to give the operators time to connect their wires with the standard timeballs and clocks.

There are timeballs in a great many cities — usually on top of some prominent building, where they can easily be seen. The one at Washington is on the roof of the state, war, and navy department building, at the top of a high pole, ready to drop the instant the signal comes over the wire.

In the government offices at Washington and in many places in other cities there are large clocks connected with the observatory by electricity. These are so arranged that when the 12 o'clock signal is flashed over the wires the hands of each one of these clocks spring to 12, no matter what time the clock may show; in this way hundreds of clocks are set to the correct time each day.

Well, the moment the sun is supposed to cross the 75th meridian, the telegraph instruments give a single tick, the timeballs drop, the clocks begin to strike, and everybody in the district knows it is 12 o'clock. — Clifford Howard in St. Nicholas.

—Davenport Daily Republican, Davenport, Iowa, March 5, 1903, page 2.

Comment: So the famous "ball" that drops on New Year's Eve, is that a "timeball" and does it come from this way of regulating clocks?