How does Britain know what time it is?

Показать описание

(you can find contact details and social links there too)

Tom Scott

Рекомендации по теме

Комментарии

And if you're wondering why "coordinated universal time" abbreviates to "UTC": that's because it officially stands for "temps universel coordonné", and this way neither English or French speakers are happy. Compromise!

TomScottGo

"How does Britain know what time it is?"

Not by looking at where the sun is. I can tell you that much.

ln

This was...bonkers. Had no idea could have clocks that 'set themselves' via radio control.

claudiajade

I met Leon Lobo 4 years ago as my company used to sell UTC synchronisation and traceability to big financial institutions.

I didn’t manage to get a single contract signed but it was fun going to Teddington and meeting the team there! Leon is a top bloke.

KaiserRom

My favorite wristwatch has this feature, the Citizen Radio Controlled series update every night and have a little dial to show whether or not it got reception last night. It’s really cool during spring forward when it stops, twitches, then the hour hand springs forward on its own.

johnbeauvais

I’ve still got my radio alarm clock that uses this transmitter must be over 20 years old! Always on time 👍🏼

alancliff

I'm betting we're being shown one of the engineering labs in the facility rather than a production time source, because that lack of cable management screams "test bench" and not "permanent infrastructure"

TastyBusiness

That's a lot of big words and technology, cool.

zinc_ave

It is so sad to think that many people cannot even read the time on the clock that Tom Scott was holding in the beginning of the video. In secondary schools for exams they have to use digital 24hr clocks because the students cannot read the time

Kaspleen

Excellent report. You always find 'The Fascinating' in the most mundane things.

arrjay

I don't know if radio controlled clocks are a thing where I live in the Northeast US, but I do remember that WAY back in the 1970's and 80's my parents would call a specific number and get a message something like, "At the tone, the time will be 12:35 and 45 seconds." followed by three short tones and a long tone.
I also recall that message coming across the radio at least once or twice a day.
-
Living as a kid in rural/suburb towns in Massachusetts, our main timekeeping was when the church bells would ring noon (get home for lunch), the fire department siren would run up then down once for 6PM (get home for dinner), and when the streetlights would turn on (get home now or you're grounded).

MonkeyJedi

If Tom had a pound for each time he'd done a monologue to camera while standing near the ocean with a domestic appliance in hand... He'd have two pounds. Which isn't a lot but it's kinda funny it's happened twice.

marktownsend

Time is nothing more than an interval of beats. No past. No present. No future. just a constant drumbeat that we organise our lives around.

BradGryphonn

I have visited the room at the US Naval Observatory where they keep time for the military and as a backup to the NIST master clock. The clocks were kept behind bullet resistant glass. Also at the Washington DC TV station I worked at we used a rubidium atomic clock to keep in sync with the NBC network. When it failed we didn't bother replacing it because we no longer needed to be synchronous. Then we got a call from NASA and they wanted to know why our color subcarrier frequency was drifting more than it used to. NASA had been using our super stable signal as a transfer standard to calibrate their own devices. They would send out a daily message noting the frequency offset from their own master clock. When we explained that we were well within FCC standards and didn't plan to install a new atomic clock, they sent us one of their cesium clocks.

whitcwa

The German equivalent radio transmitter is called DCF77 on 77 kHz … railway station clocks in Germany and the Netherlands are synchronised to it. It transmits with a nominal power of 50kW from Mainflingen.

GKDXlive