Saturday, April 11, 2020
WWV before WWV
From 'Time and Timekeepers', 1924:
The picture is instantly familiar to radio hams and SWLs, because the same bureau continued the same type of pattern in radio via WWV. Skipped ticks warn you of the coming sync point.
In these situations the receiving operator has a clock that keeps ticking during the gap, so you can count your own ticks and be ready for the top-of-minute sync. In the broader world, human perception is full of continuous clocks that detect missing sound intervals or missing visual areas. Speech is all about missing ticks. Every stop consonant is a precisely timed interval of missing laryngeal ticks. ANTICIPATION is everything.
The biggest clockmakers weren't satisfied with the secondary sync from the Bureau. They had their own observatories to measure intervals directly from the stars!
The Elgin observatory is still there, and still used as an observatory by local schools. Or it was until this year when education was defined as a crime.
Later: I had to model the observatory and show how it worked.
Each day at 11.50 a.m. Eastern standard time the Western Union Telegraph Company suspends its regular work and puts its wires at the disposal of the government for the sending of time signals. Every second the distributing clock makes contact so that the clicks heard in every telegraph office throughout the country are practically the ticks of a clock keeping accurate Eastern standard time. Certain clicks must be omitted to mark the minutes and half minutes. Thus the 29th second and the 55th to the 59th inclusive are always omitted. Just before twelve o'clock 10 clicks are omitted, that is, the 50th to the 59th inclusive and the last click at exactly noon is longer than the rest.
The picture is instantly familiar to radio hams and SWLs, because the same bureau continued the same type of pattern in radio via WWV. Skipped ticks warn you of the coming sync point.
In these situations the receiving operator has a clock that keeps ticking during the gap, so you can count your own ticks and be ready for the top-of-minute sync. In the broader world, human perception is full of continuous clocks that detect missing sound intervals or missing visual areas. Speech is all about missing ticks. Every stop consonant is a precisely timed interval of missing laryngeal ticks. ANTICIPATION is everything.
The biggest clockmakers weren't satisfied with the secondary sync from the Bureau. They had their own observatories to measure intervals directly from the stars!
The Elgin observatory is still there, and still used as an observatory by local schools. Or it was until this year when education was defined as a crime.
Later: I had to model the observatory and show how it worked.Labels: Metrology, Patient things, skill-estate
¶ 6:15 AM
