By:Anthony C Isch
To the editor:
Andy Rooney makes his living commenting and complaining about trivial things. I have my own trivia problem in that my RCN Cable Box is almost two minutes fast.
It has been that way for several weeks. I called RCN and notified them about it, but nothing has changed. The Network TV stations begin their programs on time. They are fairly accurate in their time-keeping unless there is a basketball game.
Let me tell you why this is my summer of discontent. Mankind has always been in a quest for more accurate time. Since first sundials appeared in Egypt around the year 3500 B.C., the search for accuracy continued.
The earliest water clock or clepsydra was found in the Egyptian tomb of Amenhotep I circa 1500 B.C. The Egyptians also come up with the merkhet in 600 B.C.
A pair of these astronomical instruments lined up on the star Polaris made it possible to tell time at night by making the revolution of certain stars around the North Star.
The invention of the Tall Case Clock in 1656 A.D. by Christian Huygens, a Dutch scientist finally made it possible to measure time accurately. The pendulum, which was one meter in length, oscillated in exactly a one-second period.
Huygens’ invention was fine on land, but it would not keep time on a rolling deck of a ship at sea. Navigators desperately needed a correct time standard to determine their longitude.
This was a critical problems as the lives of sailors were at stake, thus the British Government offered a prize to the person who developed an accurate Marine Chronograph. That prize was won by George Harrison in 1714.
The clock was spring driven with a balance wheel escarpment and was accurate to 1 second in 5 days. This invention saved countless lives as it replaced the hour glass as a time keeper aboard ship.
You might want to read a book from your public library titled "Longitude." It is the fascinating story of Harrison’s chronograph and how it revolutionized navigation, because for the first time, one’s longitude could be determined accurately. Loran and GPS were hundreds of years in the future.
Today, the average person has a quartz clock or watch, and now The National Institute of Science and Technology has the Cesium Atomic Clock which has defined the second as 9,192,631,770 oscillations of the cesium atom.
You can have accurate time from the atomic clock at your house by going to The National Institute for Science and Technology Web site at www.nist.gov. You will then have the official time accurate to with in 1.1 seconds of the atomic clock at Boulder, CO
RCN Cable, please set your clock!?
Anthony C Isch
Beverly Drive
Belle Mead
