The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865: A Monthly Eclectic MagazineVarious
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865: A Monthly Eclectic Magazine
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
time was midnight exactly, as measured by solar or sun-dial time: that
is, the sun may have been precisely in the nadir at that moment; but
this difficulty would not arise in practice, as the law knows only
mean time, not sun-dial time. If Greenwich time were made legal
everywhere, and if electric clocks everywhere established
communication with the master clock at the observatory, there might be
another test supplied; but under the conditions stated, it would be a
nice matter of _Tweedledum_ and _Tweedledee_ {127} to determine
whether the house clock, the church clock, or a pocket watch, should
be relied upon. All the pocket watches in the town might be brought
into the witness-box, but without avail; for if some accorded with the
house clock, others would surely be found to agree better with the
church clock.
This question of clocks, as compared with time measured by the sun,
presents some very curious aspects in relation to longitude. What's
o'clock in London will not tell you what's o'clock in Falmouth, unless
you know the difference of longitude between the two places. The sun
takes about twenty minutes to go from the zenith of the one to the
zenith of the other. Local time, the time at any particular town, is
measured from the moment of noon at that town; and noon itself is when
the sun comes to the meridian of that place. Hence Falmouth noon is
twenty minutes after London noon, Falmouth midnight twenty minutes
after London midnight; and so on. When it is ten minutes after
midnight, on the morning of Sunday, the 1st of January, in London, it
is ten minutes before midnight, on Saturday, the 31st of December, at
Falmouth. It is a Sabbath at the one place, a working-day at the
other. That particular moment of absolute time is in the year 1865 at
the one, and 1864 at the other. Therefore, we see, it might become a
ticklish point in what year a man died, solely on account of this
question of longitude, irrespective of any wrong-going or wrong-doing
of clocks, or of any other doubtful points whatever. Sooner or later
this question will have to be attended to. In all our chief towns,
nearly all our towns indeed, the railway-station clocks mark Greenwich
time, or, as it is called, "railway time;" the church clocks generally
mark local time; and some commercial clocks, to serve all parties,
mark both kinds of time on the same dial-face, by the aid of an
additional index hand. Railway time is gradually beating local time;
and the law will by-and-by have to settle which shall be used as the
standard in determining the moment of important events. Some of the
steamers plying between England and Ireland use Greenwich time in
notifying the departures from the English port, and Dublin time in
notifying those from the Irish port; a method singularly embarrassing
to a traveller who is in the habit of relying on his own watch. Does a
sailor get more prog, more grog, more pay, within a given space of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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