NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Railroad Time
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2014 Mar 2, 14:58 -0800
From: Frank Reed <FrankReed@HistoricalAtlas.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Sunday, March 2, 2014 7:51 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Railroad Time
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2014 Mar 2, 14:58 -0800
Frank may also remember this. In Chicago we used to call CAthedral 8-8000 to hear, "at the tone the time will be, eight thirty and ten seconds...beep. At the tone the time will be, eight thirty and twenty seconds...beep." I haven't checked in many years if the telephone still provides this time service.
gl
From: Frank Reed <FrankReed@HistoricalAtlas.com>
To: garylapook@pacbell.net
Sent: Sunday, March 2, 2014 7:51 PM
Subject: [NavList] Re: Railroad Time
The short answer is, yes, by telegraph. Observatories, especially government-sanctioned observatories like the USNO in the US, performed daily transit observations while also maintaining large ensembles of chronometers (for the cloudy days!) and transmitted the time to the principal telegraph offices, both government and commercial.
There's a nice article in "Sky with ocean joined : proceedings of the sesquicentennial symposia of the U.S. Naval Observatory, December 5 and 8, 1980 / edited by Steven J.. Dick and LeRoy E. Doggett" which you can read online here:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822002462802
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822002462802
Somewhere in there (I read it a few weeks ago), there's an interesting comment about other observatories complaining about the USNO's monopoly of time
dissemination to Western Union. It seems that some observatories were largely funded in the late 19th century by selling time signals.
-FER
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