WIRELESS WORLD CLOCK

Radio Record, Volume I, Issue 40, 20 April 1928, Page 15

WIRELESS WORLD CLOCK

At ten in the morning and six in the evening the Rugby (England) wireless station sends out time signals of such exactness that an astronomer on Jand or a navigator at sea could set his watch by them. For five minutes at second intervals the dots and dashes go on, and, radiating outward for hundreds or thousands of miles, tell those who pick them up not only what inquiring children call "the right time,’’? but the right place. Yor example, ‘if when the 16 o’clock signals began to tick off the navigator’s chronometer marked 20 minutes to the hour or 80 minutes past it he would be able to calculate just how many miles le was east or west of the meridian of Greenwich by which the standard time sent out by Rugby is fixed. A surveyer in Africa or Asia having the means to pick up the signals would in the same way know just what was the longitude where he was travelling; and the 3800 signals sent out in 3800 seconds are of such extreme exactness that they would serve as a correction to surveyors inapping out the land. This new British time signal, sending out the time over half the globe, is the first instalment of a plan by which the standard time will he sent out from a nuniber of selected great wireless stations. When the system is complete it will be the equivalent of an international clock and send out time for the world. It will, in short, be the World Clock. Some day, perhaps, the plancts will be able to set their time by it; we shall have one time everywhere. Whi not? Pending that achievement we may well look forward to a day when men all over the world will wear wireless watches on their wrists, or at least carry them in their pockets, to catch up the wireless signals of the time whenever they want it. ‘Then nobody will have an exeuse for missing the train.