[GreenKeys] The Navy, Time, Balls, and the Telegraph

[Don Robert House]

A tip o' the white hat to Frank Frisch...

>"...once clocks were capable of precision time-telling, the
>question was, what to set them against? In the early 19th
>century, enter the time ball. Robert Wauchope, a Royal Navy
>captain, had an idea: a large signal in a harbor would, at
>a specific moment, indicate the exact time - sailors could
>view it through a telescope and set their chronometers
>precisely.
>
>In 1829 the Admiralty gave it a shot, setting up the
>world's first time ball in the harbor at Portsmouth,
>England. It worked so well that in 1833 they set one up at
>the Royal Observatory in Flamsteed House, on a Greenwich
>hilltop. The ball, which was visible to ships at anchor,
>would be dropped every day at 1 p.m. At 12:55 p.m., the
>red, wood-and-leather ball was raised halfway up a 15-foot
>mast atop the building; at 12:58 it went to the top; and on
>the hour the ball began to drop, the start of its downward
>motion signaling exactly 1 p.m.
>
>The ball idea caught on. The United States Naval
>Observatory began dropping a noon time ball in Foggy Bottom
>in 1845 and kept it up until 1885, when the ball drop moved
>to the State, War and Navy Building (now the Eisenhower
>Executive Office Building) next to the White House, where
>it kept dropping until 1936. Starting in 1877, the Navy
>telegraphed a daily signal to the Western Union Building in
>New York, atop which an automatic time ball then dropped.
>(Twelve minutes early, to account for the difference in
>longitude; we didn't get time zones until the telegraph and
>railroads made them necessary, in the 1880s.)
>
>And as for New York, in December of 1904, this newspaper
>celebrated the move to its new Times Square building with a
>New Year's Eve party, which thereafter grew year by year.
>When, in 1907, a ban on fireworks prompted The Times to
>find a new celebration finale, a time ball was brought in,
>and the tradition began.
>
>The Times Square ball isn't quite a true time ball. The eye
>can easily pick up motion, so precise time balls mark time
>by starting to move, not by stopping. The Times Square ball
>marks time with the end of its motion - hard to perceive
>and inexact, but presumably more fun for counting backward.
>
>As timekeepers became increasingly cheap, accurate,
>automatic and interconnected, these public time signals -
>not just time balls but noontime guns as well - began to
>disappear. Today the Greenwich time ball still drops daily,
>but for tourists, not navigators; time balls drop in a few
>other world harbors, like Christchurch, New Zealand, and
>Edinburgh, but most time balls are reserved for special
>occasions, which makes it even more comforting when, once a
>year, a time ball drops in New York, and we all watch.
>
Who cares that they do it wrong? At least they do it. ..."