A Short History of Radio Controlled Clocks

How many of the clocks in your home are radio controlled?

When I mention radio controlled clocks, I’m not referring to clock radios like the one we make available for you to use in your web browser. Instead, I’m of course referring to clocks which update and synchronize their time settings based on radio signals they receive.

These days we take it for granted that our clocks synchronize the time with radio-broadcasting time servers. But this technology was, until recently, limited to the realm of expensive scientific instruments before it became adopted for popular use in our homes.

This post will attempt to summarize, in a nutshell, the history of radio controlled clocks.

1. Early versions of Time Signals are sent via Telegraph, predating radio controlled clocks.
2. November 1898: Engineer Sir Howard Grubb describes the new concept of the radio controlled clock in a speech before the Royal Dublin Society, predicting this device at least 100 years before it’s first created.
3. 1903: United States Navy broadcasts the world’s first time signal from the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) site in Washington, DC.
4. August 9, 1904: Regular, Repeated Time Signals begin to be sent from the Navy Yard in Boston.
5. Over the next few years, the US Navy begins sending time signals from a large number of different cities, including Arlington Virginia, Cape Cod, Newport, New York and Norfolk Virginia.
6. 1907: The First Time Signal is sent from outside of the United States, broadcast from station VCS in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
7. 1910: the French Bureau of Longitudes begins broadcasting time signals twice daily from its station located on the top of the Eiffel Tower.
8. 1913: The U.S. Navy radio station called NAA begins broadcasting time signals from Arlington Virginia in Morse Code. These were the first time signals that became a bit well-known.
9. 1924: the “Six-Pip” (the sound itself is more of a “peep”) system of BBC begins in London. These six audio tones are still used today by the BBC and are one of my favorite things about listening to BBC Radio.
10. 1923: The National Bureau of Standards (NBS, which later was renamed NIST) begins regular time signal broadcasts in short wave from its station called WWV in Washington, DC.

Whew! So that’s the mega-summarized history of radio controlled clocks, in a nutshell. We hope you all took notes.

Have you ever heard of NIST before? NIST stands for the National Institute of Standards & Technology and is the government office responsible for time broadcasts in the United States.

 

NIST operates the very important time-related website known as time.gov. You can always access that site to get the accurate time for any time zone within the United States.

In addition to getting the accurate time via NIST’s time website, if you’re using Windows as the operating system on your computer you can easily get your computer to synchronize its time via NIST’s time server!  Just click on the clock in your status bar. Then look for the tab clock labelled ‘internet time’. Set your Windows clock to automatically synchronize its time from time.nist.gov: this is NIST’s time server.

And the greatest thing is…if you do this, the time you see on Online Clock should hopefully be not too far off from NIST’s time – because OnlineClock.net simply uses your computer’s own time settings. If you ever move from one time zone to another, just update the time settings on your computer; OnlineClock.net will instantly show you the correct time for your new time zone.

If you ever think that the time you see on Online Clock isn’t accurate, simply correct the time settings on your computer: all OnlineClock.net does is use the same time settings as your computer to show you the correct time.

Here’s wishing that all your clocks remain radio controlled: Pip Pip Pip Pip Pip PEEP!

Sources & Recommended for further research:
http://www.boulder.nist.gov/timefreq/general/pdf/1877.pdf
http://www.nist.gov
http://www.time.gov

Tags: alarm clock, alarm clock blog, clock history, nist, online alarm clock, online clock, radio clocks, radio controlled clocks, Time, time server, time servers, time.gov

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