[time-nuts] How did they distribute time in the old days?

[Will]

Hi,

They used  (late 1970's) WWV or WWVH to sync up the time.  There was
fancy system that used a neon on a rotating disc rather like an early
depth sounder. Neon flashed with seconds beep. There was a way of
rotating the field that drove the disk to advance/delay the system to
set it fairly accurately.

Cheers,
Will

On 14/10/15 18:12, Hal Murray wrote:
> holrum at hotmail.com said:
>> Somewhat time-nut related...  the project main application needed
>> millisecond consistent (not necessarily accurate) time stamps on a
>> world-wide network.  That was in the pre-gps, pre-fiber, pre-historic
>> before-times.  I don't think that they ever quite got there. 
> World wide seismology took off in the early 1970s as background for nuclear 
> underground non-testing treaties.  Both the US and the USSR had to be sure 
> they could detect the opponents tests and distinguish tests from earthquakes. 
>  We had seismic stations scattered around the globe.
>
> Does anybody know how they distributed time back then and/or how accurately 
> they could do it?
>
> Google says the speed of sound in rock is 6-8 km/s so 10 ms error would be 
> 100 meters.  That seems like a reasonable ballpark.
>
>
>