[Image: The London ?time ball? at Greenwich, courtesy Royal Museums Greenwich].
Thanks to the effects of jet lag getting worse as I get older, I was basically awake for five days in London last week?but, on the bright side, it meant I got to read a ton of books.
Amongst them was an interesting new look at the history of weather science and atmospheric forecasting?sky futures!?by Peter Moore called The Weather Experiment. There were at least two things in it worth commenting on, one of which I?ll save for the next post.
This will doubtless already be common knowledge for many people, of course, but I was thrilled to learn about something called the London ?time ball.? Installed at the Greenwich Royal Observatory in 1833 by John Pond, England?s Royal Astronomer, the time ball was a kind of secular church bell, an acoustic spacetime signal for ships. It was ?a large metal ball,? Moore writes, ?attached to a pole at the Royal Observatory. At 1 p.m. each day it dropped to earth with an echoing thud so that ships in the Thames could calibrate their chronometers.? As such, it soon ?became a familiar part of the Greenwich soundscape,? an Enlightenment variation on the Bow Bells. Born within sound of the time signal...

[Image: Historic shot of the time ball, via the South London Branch of the British Horological Institute].
There are many things I love about this, but one is the sheer fact that time was synchronized by something as unapologetically blunt as a sound rever...