CHECK ON TIME

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXV, Issue 299, 4 December 1935, Page 6

CHECK ON TIME

STORY BEHIND THE CLOCK Elaborate Day-to-Day Procedure RADIO AND POST OFFICES When you are hurrying to your office or workshop in the mornings, and, as you pass the Post Office or the nearest jeweller’s, check the time by your wristlet or pocket watch, do you ever consider the elaborate precautions which are taken so that you may have the correct time! We have become so used to checking our timepieces with clocks in public places and jewellers’ windows that we regard this fairly regular day-to-day procedure of ours as nothing more uncommon than tieing our shoes.

Some of us, probably a good many of us, synchronise our watches with the time given over the radio. Ami equally many of us perhaps feel a glow of satisfaction as we pass tho jeweller’s window, or the clock in the vestibule of the Hastings Post Office, to find that our watches arc exactly right. But how many people know how the jewellers and the postal and railway officials in every town and hamlet in the country keep the correct time!

Think of the glorious confusion there would be, for instance, if a householder in Auckland set his watch by one of tho tramway clocks which kept its own time standards. Suppose he lived at Milford, and wished to catch the Limited express. He would need to be observant if the tramway time were different from the time observed by tho busses, which in turn were slightly out of step with the ferry time service, and this again varied, say, a minute from the railway time. He would need to observe tho time lag between the bus time-table and that of the ferry, and the difference between the ferry and the railway, and then calculate how his watch, which was daily compared with one of the tramway clocks, compared with each and everyone of them. Surely, a fairly good argument in favour of a universal time system in New Zealand!

The foregoing example has been pur posely exaggerated to lay due emphasis upon the desirability of having taken all the precautions which are taken by the radio, telegraph and railway authorities io see that in their daily occupations and journcyings, New Zealanders shall have a common denominator in time.

In a number of different ways which have a common end, these authorities conspire that we shall arrive at the office and the workshop within a reasonable scope of punctuality; that when we leave home and eheck out watches with our clocks on the mantlepiece, and again, most probably, with the one in the Hastings Post Office—for we unconsciously look at and many times check our timepieces—we shall safely check them. First, how do jewellers cheek tliclr time so that we may check ours! borne follow the very old, but very Bound, practice of keeping a chronometer in their shops, for the precision and a<>' curacy of chronometers is a byword. Others have radio to keen check upon them. Some have followed the modern trend by installing electric clocks, which are regulated from the hydroelectric power stations. Not a few rely upon the clock in the Post Office. But what about the post offices! Is the time by the Hastings Post Office clock the same as the one in Levin! Or the Levin one the same as that at Gore! And the railway offices! What a tangle of traffic there would be if the time schedule at Green Lane were a minute ahead of, say, Taumarunui; if to find the time at Ohakune you had to deduct a further half-minute from Taumarunui’s time.

The answer is given each morning a few minutes before 9 o’clock. Wo shall take the Post and Telegraph Department first. All stations are linked in one gigantic network. For about three minutes an operator in the General Post Office at Wellington depresses and releases his transmitting key, spelling out the two letters “LS” “LS” “LS,” which it office jargon for “AU stations.” ,

As soon as the hour is due, he depresses his key and flashes the letter “T” (meaning “Time”) to all urban post offices, which in turn relay tho signal to offices in outlying districts. This method has been followed with success for a great many years. The Railway Department follows a similar system, and at the same time of the day. These, then are the main reasons why we may confidently look at tho clock in the jeweller’s window or the one in the vestibule of the Hastings Post Office, and be sure that we shall bo given the correct time, for no doubt we all had a vague idea that somewhere in Wellington, in a place called the Dominion Observatory, is a man who keeps a check upon the clock which keeps a check upon us and our time.

In a few weeks from now, Hastings people will have another method of gauging the accuracy of their watches, for tho mechanism in the new clock tower is calculated to give the correct time within a very minute degree of accuracy. So does the work of one man measure up the degree of accuracy in that of another.