6 ms·

Railway time

94 points by perihelions 3y ago

greenyoda 3y ago
Interesting that by 1855, they had a sort of "Network Time Protocol" running over telegraph lines: > By 1852 a telegraph link had been constructed between a new electro-magnetic clock at Greenwich and initially Lewisham, and shortly after this London Bridge stations. It also connected via the Central Telegraph Station of the Electric Time Company in the City of London, which enabled the transmission of a time signal along the railway telegraphic network to other stations. By 1855 time signals from Greenwich could be sent through wires alongside the railway lines across the length and breadth of Britain.[1] By the late 19th Century, they had invented "master clocks": > Between the late 1800s and the availability of Internet time services, many large institutions that depended on accurate timekeeping such as schools, offices, railway networks, telephone exchanges, and factories used master/slave clock networks. These consisted of multiple slave clocks and other timing devices, connected through wires to a master clock which kept them synchronized by electrical signals. The master clock was usually a precision pendulum clock with a seconds pendulum and a robust mechanism. It generated periodic timing signals by electrical contacts attached to the mechanism, transmitted to the controlled equipment through pairs of wires.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time#Influence_of_the_electric_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time#Influence_of_the_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_clock#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_clock#History
bruce511 3y ago
>> The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. The cynic in me doesn't find this even mildly surprising. Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight. This stubbornness seems to be baked into the human condition, this "they can't tell we what to do" sounds suspiciously like small child having a tantrum. As their world changed, it brought about new challenges, which required cooperation to solve. And it was the cooperation rather than the solution which proved to be a stumbling block. I'm working hard to resist ending this note with a highly sarcastic sentence. [1] the differences being small, typically 15 mins or so.
- RangerScience 3y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State has a whole bunch about how towns protect themselves from centralized authorities by being less comprehensible / requiring local knowledge to navigate. It’s one of the ways that power balances were maintained. So the downside is “you can more effectively yield your power here”, or more specifically: “you can take more in taxes and conscription.” Centralized time might be pretty small in the scheme of centralization - and come with numerous other benefits - but, that generalized resistance doesn’t come from nowhere, or irrationality, or stupidity. IMHO it’s not that “don’t tell me what to do” is baked into the human condition, it’s that we bake into our condition that when people tell you what to do, it’s better for them and not necessarily better for you.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    I'm not against fighting the good fight, when one side wins and the other loses. But fighting "just because" the other side has a position seems counter-productive. If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational. It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.
    - RangerScience 3y ago
      Oh sure - call it “cognitive homeostasis” or something like that, as a baseline thing. But I do think we socialize people to be obstinate, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, some of which are: 1) How often has someone told you what to do, and been more right, versus times they’ve been more wrong, or missing something about your situation, or lying about their motivations and goals, such that what they were telling you wasn’t actually what you should do? 2) Totally makes sense to me that towns, etc, would have a history of the central authority showing up and saying “change like this”, and only awhile later finding out why that was bad for them. 3) AFAIK, most of the time the experience a town would have with a central authority is that authority showing up to take something the town doesn’t want to give. So you put all that together, and it makes sense to me that people would resist something like centralized time keeping “just because”.
globular-toast 3y ago
When I did my deep dive on time (a rite of passage for any serious programmer) it took surprisingly long to realise that having a single clock to which everyone around the world synchronises is something we take for granted but is something that needed inventing. GMT became the standard just because they did it first.
- defrost 3y ago
  The Paris meridian is a meridian line running through the Paris Observatory in Paris, France – now longitude 2°20′14.02500″ East. It was a long-standing rival to the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world. The "Paris meridian arc" or "French meridian arc" (French: la Méridienne de France) is the name of the meridian arc measured along the Paris meridian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian It (the Greenwich meridian) became the standard via weight of maps and naval strength of the British, there are many maps from the early days that don't follow the Greenwich standard, enough so that "wrong longitude because we assumed wrong meridian" is a minor trope in treasure map stories.
- perilunar 3y ago
  Not so much first as most: Greenwich was the prime meridian because "Britannia ruled the waves", and Britain made most of the nautical charts.
  - mikhailfranco 3y ago
    There is a feedback loop between accuracy of clocks and accuracy of charts. Measuring longitude requires an accurate clock on a ship, which can keep a reference time to compare with local solar time. The obvious challenges include motion of the ship and huge ranges of temperature encountered on global voyages. Britain invented the best maritime clocks by encouraging open competition for a large prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards See the book Longitude by Dava Sobel. You can see John Harrison's chronometers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich - on the top of a small hill in a park in south-east London. It really is amazing how the original desktop clock monsters were shrunk down to a pocket watch that had better accuracy. Greenwich was the prime meridian because Britain invented the best clocks.
languagehacker 3y ago
If you find this story interesting, give Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants by James Vincent a read. It was absolutely splendid and littered with great tales about how measurements such as this helped broader and broader communities function in concert, while at the same time sacrificing our personal freedom and leisure bit by bit.
Steve44 3y ago
Canary Wharf in London has a installation of six Swiss railway clocks which, invisible to most people passing by, has a clever way of synchronising. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-railway-clocks-11962/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-r... > The second hand takes 58.5 seconds to rotate around by 59 seconds, then the second hand pauses. It waits until a nationwide pulse is sent to every Swiss railway clock that a minute has passed, then the clock jumps to the minute and carries on for another 58.5 seconds.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  If anyone likes the aesthetic of the watch face, you can buy a design for your wrist: * https://mondaine.com https://mondaine.com Apple (potentially) copied (?) the design in 2012 and there was a bit of drama about it and they ended up cutting a cheque: * https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367216/apple-sbb-mondaine-clock-watch-design-plagiarism https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367216/apple-sbb-mondain... * https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/time-is-money-apple-pays-21m-for-clock-design-says-report/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/time-is-money-apple-...

94 points by perihelions 3y ago

Interesting that by 1855, they had a sort of "Network Time Protocol" running over telegraph lines: > By 1852 a telegraph link had been constructed between a new electro-magnetic clock at Greenwich and initially Lewisham, and shortly after this London Bridge stations. It also connected via the Central Telegraph Station of the Electric Time Company in the City of London, which enabled the transmission of a time signal along the railway telegraphic network to other stations. By 1855 time signals from Greenwich could be sent through wires alongside the railway lines across the length and breadth of Britain.[1] By the late 19th Century, they had invented "master clocks": > Between the late 1800s and the availability of Internet time services, many large institutions that depended on accurate timekeeping such as schools, offices, railway networks, telephone exchanges, and factories used master/slave clock networks. These consisted of multiple slave clocks and other timing devices, connected through wires to a master clock which kept them synchronized by electrical signals. The master clock was usually a precision pendulum clock with a seconds pendulum and a robust mechanism. It generated periodic timing signals by electrical contacts attached to the mechanism, transmitted to the controlled equipment through pairs of wires.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time#Influence_of_the_electric_telegraph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time#Influence_of_the_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_clock#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_clock#History

bruce511 3y ago

>> The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. The cynic in me doesn't find this even mildly surprising. Faced with an inevitable outcome, which had clear benefits, with no discernable down-sides [1], the population still managed to find the time, energy and will to fight. This stubbornness seems to be baked into the human condition, this "they can't tell we what to do" sounds suspiciously like small child having a tantrum. As their world changed, it brought about new challenges, which required cooperation to solve. And it was the cooperation rather than the solution which proved to be a stumbling block. I'm working hard to resist ending this note with a highly sarcastic sentence. [1] the differences being small, typically 15 mins or so.

RangerScience 3y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State has a whole bunch about how towns protect themselves from centralized authorities by being less comprehensible / requiring local knowledge to navigate. It’s one of the ways that power balances were maintained. So the downside is “you can more effectively yield your power here”, or more specifically: “you can take more in taxes and conscription.” Centralized time might be pretty small in the scheme of centralization - and come with numerous other benefits - but, that generalized resistance doesn’t come from nowhere, or irrationality, or stupidity. IMHO it’s not that “don’t tell me what to do” is baked into the human condition, it’s that we bake into our condition that when people tell you what to do, it’s better for them and not necessarily better for you.
- bruce511 3y ago
  I'm not against fighting the good fight, when one side wins and the other loses. But fighting "just because" the other side has a position seems counter-productive. If we make decisions, to our own detriment, purely to be in opposition, then I think that's irrational. It's hard to give an example that won't immediately derail this conversation, precisely because every topic seems to be judged on what position the other side has, but its not hard to see this play out every day.
  - RangerScience 3y ago
    Oh sure - call it “cognitive homeostasis” or something like that, as a baseline thing. But I do think we socialize people to be obstinate, for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, some of which are: 1) How often has someone told you what to do, and been more right, versus times they’ve been more wrong, or missing something about your situation, or lying about their motivations and goals, such that what they were telling you wasn’t actually what you should do? 2) Totally makes sense to me that towns, etc, would have a history of the central authority showing up and saying “change like this”, and only awhile later finding out why that was bad for them. 3) AFAIK, most of the time the experience a town would have with a central authority is that authority showing up to take something the town doesn’t want to give. So you put all that together, and it makes sense to me that people would resist something like centralized time keeping “just because”.

globular-toast 3y ago

When I did my deep dive on time (a rite of passage for any serious programmer) it took surprisingly long to realise that having a single clock to which everyone around the world synchronises is something we take for granted but is something that needed inventing. GMT became the standard just because they did it first.

defrost 3y ago
The Paris meridian is a meridian line running through the Paris Observatory in Paris, France – now longitude 2°20′14.02500″ East. It was a long-standing rival to the Greenwich meridian as the prime meridian of the world. The "Paris meridian arc" or "French meridian arc" (French: la Méridienne de France) is the name of the meridian arc measured along the Paris meridian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_meridian It (the Greenwich meridian) became the standard via weight of maps and naval strength of the British, there are many maps from the early days that don't follow the Greenwich standard, enough so that "wrong longitude because we assumed wrong meridian" is a minor trope in treasure map stories.
perilunar 3y ago
Not so much first as most: Greenwich was the prime meridian because "Britannia ruled the waves", and Britain made most of the nautical charts.
- mikhailfranco 3y ago
  There is a feedback loop between accuracy of clocks and accuracy of charts. Measuring longitude requires an accurate clock on a ship, which can keep a reference time to compare with local solar time. The obvious challenges include motion of the ship and huge ranges of temperature encountered on global voyages. Britain invented the best maritime clocks by encouraging open competition for a large prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_rewards See the book Longitude by Dava Sobel. You can see John Harrison's chronometers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich - on the top of a small hill in a park in south-east London. It really is amazing how the original desktop clock monsters were shrunk down to a pocket watch that had better accuracy. Greenwich was the prime meridian because Britain invented the best clocks.

languagehacker 3y ago

If you find this story interesting, give Beyond Measure: The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants by James Vincent a read. It was absolutely splendid and littered with great tales about how measurements such as this helped broader and broader communities function in concert, while at the same time sacrificing our personal freedom and leisure bit by bit.

Steve44 3y ago

Canary Wharf in London has a installation of six Swiss railway clocks which, invisible to most people passing by, has a clever way of synchronising. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-railway-clocks-11962/ https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/see-londons-six-swiss-r... > The second hand takes 58.5 seconds to rotate around by 59 seconds, then the second hand pauses. It waits until a nationwide pulse is sent to every Swiss railway clock that a minute has passed, then the clock jumps to the minute and carries on for another 58.5 seconds.

throw0101c 3y ago
If anyone likes the aesthetic of the watch face, you can buy a design for your wrist: * https://mondaine.com https://mondaine.com Apple (potentially) copied (?) the design in 2012 and there was a bit of drama about it and they ended up cutting a cheque: * https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367216/apple-sbb-mondaine-clock-watch-design-plagiarism https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367216/apple-sbb-mondain... * https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/time-is-money-apple-pays-21m-for-clock-design-says-report/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/time-is-money-apple-...