The American Waltham Watch Company, as it eventually became known, benefited greatly from a huge demand for watches during the Civil War, when Union Army forces used them to synchronize operations. Improvements in fabrication techniques further boosted output and reduced prices significantly. Meanwhile other U.S. companies formed in the hope of capturing part of the burgeoning trade. The Swiss, who had previously dominated the industry, grew concerned when their exports plummeted in the 1870s. The investigator they sent to Massachusetts discovered that not only was productivity higher at the Waltham factory but production costs were less. Even some of the lower-grade American watches could be expected to keep reasonably good time. The watch was at last a commodity accessible to the masses.
Because women had worn bracelet watches in the 19th century, wristwatches were long considered feminine accoutrements. During World War I, however, the pocket watch was modified so that it could be strapped to the wrist, where it could be viewed more readily on the battlefield. With the help of a substantial marketing campaign, the masculine fashion for wristwatches caught on after the war. Self-winding mechanical wristwatches made their appearance during the 1920s.
High-Precision Clocks
At the end of the 19th century, Sigmund Riefler, based in Munich, developed a radical new design of regulator—a highly accurate timekeeper that served as a standard for controlling others. Housed in a partial vacuum to minimize the effects of barometric pressure and equipped with a pendulum largely unaffected by temperature variations, Riefler’s regulators attained an accuracy of a tenth of a second a day and were thus adopted by nearly every astronomical observatory.
Further progress came several decades later, when English railroad engineer William H. Shortt designed a so-called free pendulum clock that reputedly kept time to within about a second a year. Shortt’s system incorporated two pendulum clocks, one a “master” (housed in an evacuated tank) and the other a “slave” (which contained the time dials). Every 30 seconds the slave clock gave an electromagnetic impulse to, and was in turn regulated by, the master clock pendulum, which was thus nearly free from mechanical disturbances.
Although Shortt clocks began to displace Rieflers as observatory regulators during the 1920s, their superiority was short-lived. In 1928 Warren A. Marrison, an engineer at Bell Laboratories, then in New York City, discovered an extremely uniform and reliable frequency source that was as revolutionary for timekeeping as the pendulum had been 272 years earlier. Developed originally for use in radio broadcasting, the quartz crystal vibrates at a highly regular rate when excited by an electric current. The first quartz clocks installed at the Royal Observatory in 1939 varied by only two thousandths of a second a day. By the end of World War II, this accuracy had improved to the equivalent of a second every 30 years.
Quartz-crystal technology did not remain the premier frequency standard for long either, however. By 1948 Harold Lyons and his associates at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., had based the first atomic clock on a far more precise and stable source of timekeeping: an atom’s natural resonant frequency, the periodic oscillation between two of its energy states. Subsequent experiments in both the U.S. and England in the 1950s led to the development of the cesium-beam atomic clock. Today the averaged times of cesium clocks in various parts of the world provide the standard frequency for Coordinated Universal Time, which has an accuracy of better than one nanosecond a day.
Up to the mid-20th century, the sidereal day, the period of the earth’s rotation on its axis in relation to the stars, was used to determine standard time. This practice had been retained even though it had been suspected since the late 18th century that our planet’s axial rotation was not entirely constant. The rise of cesium clocks capable of measuring discrepancies in the earth’s spin, however, meant that a change was necessary. A new definition of the second, based on the resonant frequency of the cesium atom, was adopted as the new standard unit of time in 1967.
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Add CommentReading this article was a wonderfully informative, and illuminating use of my time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFrom the origins of timekeeping nomenclature, to measuring the magnetic field created by a heartbeat, this is the most comprehensive, yet brief, study of how the measurement of time relates to history. Very nicely written, thank you.
To Happy Phil : My compliments, I could not have written it better.To Happy Phil : My compliments, I could not have written it better. Dr.Kamlander.@aon.at
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNice slice of history...very much enjoyed...Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting, informative post. An in depth article by the author would be greatly appreciated by such as me, if not the general citizen who is more entranced with brevity.
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