The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-12-13
UNCLE SAMUEL'S
 GREAT CLOCK Governments System of Tell
 ing Correct Time TO ALL OF ITS PEOPLE Observatory Created to Standardize Time fin Navy-Hours Are Tfcked
 or to All Parts of the
TO ALL OF ITS PEOPLE
From the Buffalo News.

l From the Buffalo News.
 | million miles of telegraph and cable
 wires throughout the world are thrown
 open to the tick of sidereal clock in
 the naval observatory on the heights
 overlooking Washington. Uncle Sam | through them calls his Happy New
 Year. to all the world Every city and
 hamlet in the nation, the ships at sea | travellers to foreign lands may be in-
 formed of the moment that the nation officially announces the arrival of time s
 new span. Yet the plain faced old time-
 piece merely swings it's pendulum as
 might any such on an obscure mantel
 and knows not the import of the message
 it sends.
 | The tick of this clock is the message of
 them all that extends furthest of all those
 since the world began. It is flashed out from the naval observatory at W ashing-
 ton each year. AS the seasons pass the extent of its reach is increased, and that l of next New Years will go farther than | any of it's predecessors. It will be ticked off to Nome, to Rio de Janeiro, to Shang- | hai, to Cape of Good Hope. to London.
 It will inform the lonely operator at a
 wayside station in Al izona that the New Year has arrived at Washington. It car ries the message to the farming town in
 Iowa and to waiting thousands in Bos- ton It drops the time balls from a score of stations that have to do with stan dard time.
 | This message awalzes a spark of en- | thusiasm in the breasts of those banished to the lonely island of Guam to learn | that 1t is New Year back home. The
 men of the fleet and of the ocean craft
 far out at sea pick up it's message and re-
 Joice. It unlooses more footing of whis- ties and firing of cannon than would d
 Gettysburg. It's widespread message is
 the unloosing of the great demonstration of the war.
 All those wires and cables and cur
 rents of the air respond automatically to the ticking of this plain old clock at the observatory, which clock is the off cial standard time regulator of half the world. There is none of the relaying and delay in the ordinary transmission of messages, for those contracts are au- tomatic and the message is instantaneous. Each time the pendulum swings a con- tact is made that sends its message and that individual stroke Is the far reaching New Year proclamation.
 It all comes about through the work that the naval observatory has done to standardize time. It was found some years ago that there was need of having
 something by which to regulate and set the chronometers of the ships of the navy.
 So the naval observatory was created for the purpose of regulating the chro- nometers of ships. Soon it was found that there was a demand from other sources of exact time. Official Washing ton saw no reason why it's watches should
 not be right in that the government had on tap this hairbreadtn exactness of time. A ball was rigged up on top of the state, war and navy building and connected with the clock in the observatory ir such a way that 1t would be dropped by electric ity at the exact hour of noon. It was a good idea and the people of the na- tional capital were enthusiastic over 1t. In all the years it has been in operation the enthusiasm has not waned. Each day as the hour approaches, office windows, street corners, every available space that gives view of the time ball is likely to be filled by people with watches in their hands. waiting for the ball to fall. New York, Boston, New Orleans, Buff
 falo and other points of importance heard of the innovation and dickcred with the government for an arrange ment by which they might acquire time balls and get this very accurate setting of their clocks. The stations were