Famous Modern Clocks

In a previous blog post, we discussed some famous clocks of yore. Clocks have a wonderful rich history. What was once powered by water and took up a huge amount of space can now fit on a wrist. Microchips, crystals, and atoms have taken the place of water buckets, huge gears, and monstrous mechanical contraptions. Modern famous clocks are very different from historic famous clocks.

The first modern famous clock that must be mentioned is the atomic clock. The road to the current atomic clock can be read in our previous post. The current relevant point is what the atomic clock did for all of “clockdom”. The time of a second is extrapolated from the amount of time in a minute. The length of a minute is rooted in the length of an hour. The span of an hour is based upon the length of a day. The amount of time in a day is based upon celestial bodies. A day is how long it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis. The atomic clock changed all of that.

The 13th conference of Weights and Measurements separated our timekeeping from the nuts and bolts of the solar system. They declared that a second was based upon the vibrations of a cesium atom. Atomic clocks use cesium atoms to keep time. Steve Jefferts and Dawn Meekof developed the atomic clock called NIST-F1. That is the current atomic clock responsible for world time. It’s located in Boulder, Colorado and is maintained by Steve Jefferts, Tom Heavner, and Elizabeth Donley. These diligent scientists have blended mechanical engineering, physics, and horology. Three cheers for them!

Our next modern clock is a metaphorical clock. The Doomsday Clock gives us a visual representation of how close we are to killing ourselves and destroying our world. It was started in 1947 by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The clock was originally set for seven minutes to midnight. Midnight is the metaphorical time of the end of the world. This clock is the source of the idiom “a minute till midnight” as a way of saying impending doom. In 1953, the clock hit two minutes till midnight when the US and Soviet Union tested some nuclear weapons. In 1991, the clock was set at 17 minutes till midnight when the US and Soviet Union both signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

Is worldwide doom not personal enough for you? How about some individual doom? The internet has given us a wide variety of things. Some items birthed on the internet are useful, some are entertaining, and some are things we wish were never there. The Death Clock might fight into all of those categories. The user inputs some basic information and the Death Clock uses statistics to guesstimate your day of death. How cheerful!

With all this worry about death, doom, and the future, we need to take a look at now—a nice long look at now. The Long Now clock reminds us to do that. It’s the slowest running clock in the world. Also called the Millennium Clock, it “ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.” The Long Now Foundation seeks to fight our need for cheap instant thought and work with slower more thoughtful work. The clock is still in construction and is being designed to be accurate for 10,000 years and run off Bronze Age technology. The first prototype was completed in 1997 by Danny Hills and is currently housed in the Science Museum in London in the Making of the Modern World exhibit.

No modern famous clock discussion would be complete without talking about a clock that isn’t really a clock. The National Debt Clock located in Times Square is a counter that keeps track of the USA’s national debt. It was started by Seymour Durst in 1989. At that time the country had 2.7 trillion dollars of debt. In 2000, Douglas Durst, Seymour’s son, covered the clock with a red, white, and blue curtain. The US had balanced the budget and The National Debt Clock seemed to be, thankfully, obsolete. The clock came back two years later. It now reads over 10 trillion dollars.

Since we’re talking about clocks that aren’t clocks, we should mention one very famous “clock”: the launch pad timer at the Kennedy Space Station. It is an icon of NASA. It shows up in every movie that has ever involved launching a shuttle. During the space-craze, Americans everywhere kept their eyes glued on it before launches. It can be watched on the internet. I contacted NASA trying to find out more information about the clock. Who invented it? How long has it been there? How big are the numbers? Has it ever gone down? My e-mail was forwarded to a few different people and I never got my answers.

If I ever get a reply from the public relations department at NASA, I’ll report on it. We do not like it when people are so secretive about their clocks. Maybe it has been made with super-secret alien technology from Area-51. Maybe we’ve tapped into a great clock mystery. Could OnlineClock.net have stumbled upon a government secret? If I get kidnapped by men in black suits, I’ll try to post from my phone.

Hey, in this long, impressive list of modern clocks…could it be that we’ve forgotten one? Why, yes of course: the world’s first Online Alarm Clock Website.

We went live back in March of 2006 and will soon be celebrating our fourth year of being online.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for using our clocks, and for making the whole panoply of clock stuff that is our world here at OnlineClock.net simply a whole lot of FUN.

Thanks Online Clock Fans, you guys all rock!!!

Tags: atomic clocks, bulletin of atomic scientists, clocks, death clock, doomsday clock, famous clocks, famous modern clocks, launch pad timer, long now clock, millenium clock, National Debt Clock, nist-f1 atomic clock, online alarm clock