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> I’m not particularly patriotic, but this kind of thing feels particularly American. ??? America has no doubt done some very remarkable things (the moon landi
by anyfoo 2y ago
> I’m not particularly patriotic, but this kind of thing feels particularly American.
??? America has no doubt done some very remarkable things (the moon landing, the first backward compatible color TV standard), but I don't think this is a notable example of that.
I think everyone in Europe was familiar with even wristwatches getting the time from "airwaves". At least in Germany, watches were a very common thing since the 80s (I think everyone old enough vividly remembers the many Junghans commercials on TV). The corresponding signal has been broadcast for many decades earlier, as it's no surprise that railroad and airplane networks were in need of a common time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCF77
> But we had a problem, and we solved it with technology. And none of that fancy newfangled technology — we solved it using solid technology, the kind that you can touch with your hands and that buzzes in the airwaves.
There wasn't much "newfangled technology" around at the time. We essentially solved it using the simplest method there was at the time, at least I find it a bit hard to come up with a simpler one.
Also, what would be an example of technology that you can't either "touch with your hands" or that does "buzz in airwaves"?
- aeonik 2y agoUS seems to be the first to pioneer this according to my very cursory research: https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/us-navy-wireless-transmitting-station-arlington-virginia-1913 https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/multimedia-asset/us-navy-wi...
- anyfoo 2y agoI stand corrected, it seems to indeed have been the US Navy that pioneered time signals. France followed up a few years later. I don’t know who had the first system accessible to civilians, but at this point we’d just be arguing details.
- lloeki 2y agoFrom the link: > Radio time signals for setting chronometers were sent from stations such as NAA in Arlington, Virginia, which began broadcasting in 1913. The time was supplied from a direct communication line with the clocks of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. In combination with another low-frequency installation mounted on the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the towers had the range to cover the North Atlantic Ocean and the eastern United States. So I looked up the Eiffel tower. > The Eiffel Tower time signal broadcasts began on May 23, 1910 https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2131.pdf https://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/2131.pdf Also, same source starts with the 1898 proposal of time sync via radio being made by an Irish bloke. > I don’t know who had the first system accessible to civilians, but at this point we’d just be arguing details. Agreed. Even non-civilian, and whoever came first, the timeline of things across various countries, I don't think the core point of TFA holds water: it's not a "particularly American" thing, it just made sense out of engineering requirements: time sync was transmitted over telegraph wires, and telegraph went wireless; the leap is not exactly surprising.
- aeonik 2y agoNice find! This turns out to be quite an interesting rabbit hole. It's definitely earlier than I would have guessed regardless.
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- Dalewyn 2y ago>what would be an example of technology that you can't either "touch with your hands" or that does "buzz in airwaves"? Microprocessors and lights/lasers respectively, among I'm certain countless other examples.
- anyfoo 2y agoI can touch microprocessors, and lasers are buzzing in airwaves. It’s the same electromagnetic radiation as what we know as radio, just at much, much higher frequencies. But this was asked in the context of solving this problem, in the 1950s.
- pavel_lishin 2y agoSure, but trench soldiers used to build their own radios. A soldier today stationed in the middle of a war isn't likely to assemble their own laser emitter.
- anyfoo 2y agoI don’t think anybody at that time could have built a laser emitter, even. Not sure why you would want to, to solve that problem, even today. I feel like the point of my question was lost.
- Dalewyn 2y ago>I can touch microprocessors, No you can't, you're just touching the box they come in. You can touch copper cables and wires, vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and (large!) printed circuit boards among other "basic" electronic components. You can't touch microprocessors, it's even stated on the tin they are microscopic in scale; you can't touch that in any meaningful way.
- anyfoo 2y agoWe could argue about that, but let me rephrase then: What technology that you can neither touch, nor that buzzes in airwaves, could they have used to solve this problem back then?
- someguydave 2y agoDigital communications is America’s gift to the world, look up Claude Shannon
- sokoloff 2y agoI think the Englishman George Boole deserves significant credit as well.
- spixy 2y agoAC motor, steam, diesel, jet engines are european "gifts to the world", yet it would be cringe to write sentence like "I’m not particularly patriotic, but this kind of thing feels particularly European"
- Aloisius 2y ago> I think everyone in Europe was familiar with even wristwatches getting the time from "airwaves". At least in Germany, watches were a very common thing since the 80s Not the 80s. The first radio controlled wristwatch came out in 1990 (Junghans Mega 1).
- anyfoo 2y agoSorry, I mistranslated “clock” (hence why I differentiated “wristwatch” in the sentence before). We owned a Funkuhr-Wecker in the 80s, so, an alarm clock synchronizing to DCF77, in the 80s. The wristwatches came a bit later, yeah (not that I’d have known without looking it up whether that was earlier or later than 1990).
- layman51 2y agoI wondered about its American origins too. I vaguely remember a little detail in the novel Cryptonomicon where one of the characters (a Lieutenant in the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII) sets his watch with a radio time signal. So that got me thinking that maybe the idea arose in different places. Also I was wondering about the “forever” wording. I imagine the signal is very robust, but couldn’t American politics just one day decide that it’s not worth it to broadcast the time by radio signal anymore?