Fans of Tom Scott's Citation Needed, if you haven't seen this... well
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzfiF9ccZvQ&list=PLrkYtXgEpu...
> When the sun is at its highest in the sky we call it midday or noon but the earth spins on a slightly inclined axis so the point closest to the sun is constantly changing. This change means that a person in London will have their midday at a different time to a person in New York and that will be different to a person in Beijing
This is a very misleading description. The point closest to the sun would be constantly changing even if the axis of earth's spin was not inclined relative to the sun.
In the early noughties I ended up being called in as a consultant to sort out a somewhat broken Novell eDirectory. Password changes working sporadically, details not propagating sometimes - you probably know this story.
I found a NTP stratum 1 source on site that someone had bought and forgotten about and the internet was available. DNS was also broken for IP and IPX/SPX was a bit special. I fixed up DNS and registered some host names and so on. I removed some odd routes in SPX and IP. I put all partitions on the three central office boxes and distributed the rest. I ran an awful lot of dsrepair and watched a lot of dstrace with various flags until the red turned to green. I'd get a partition into a decent state, then drop the replicas and rebuild them from the first one - all lots of fun.
Anyway, it was DNS and NTP (it always is). That isn't the real punchline ...
The company was called First Great Western (1)! I must stress this was not the time sources for their trains and operations equipment which was totally separate and properly managed by qualified professionals. Their general office IT needed a bit of a hand.
So I can lay claim to bringing time to GWR, if you squint hard enough! A few years later I did a similar job for ScotRail, when they too still had Novell office servers. I used FGW's servers as sources - it seemed appropriate 8)
(EDIT to add):
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_time - mentions GWR in line 1 and links to all the other related info.
This seems very mundane now that a Casio F-91W can give all the practical timekeeping position a person needs for the cost of a meal. I found it interesting the watch she used ("Mr Arnold") was some 40 years old when her father started the business and nearly 150 years old when she stopped. It was made by John Arnold[1], who essentially invented the accurate watch.
Also:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Belville
* https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ruth-belville-the-greenwic...
Via a weblog from the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation:
* https://rntfnd.org/2025/03/09/the-greenwich-time-lady-sold-t...
The wonderful historical podcast Futility Closet did a great episode about Ruth Belville, which went some way to explaining her business model and how it still worked with technological advancements. https://www.futilitycloset.com/2016/06/06/podcast-episode-10...
I found it initially while looking for the Citation Needed episode from The Technical Difficulties, which is less informed, but quite fun. https://youtu.be/RzfiF9ccZvQ
Excited to see my village mentioned on the frontpages of HN!
Seems like the red ball rising to near the top was regularly missed, I reckon an appropriately placed cannon that fired 5 minutes before the ball dropped would've been a suitably British way to warn everyone
> Around 1911 she moved to Ewell Cottage, London Road, Ewell.
The article seemed to wander off a bit at the end. But since this is from Epsom and Ewell ( nowhere near Greenwich) it now makes sense.
For those who haven't read it in detail, the history of the invention and refinement of the marine chronometer is fascinating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_chronometer
> In 1833 James Pond, the Astronomer Royal, introduced the Greenwich Time Ball...
Did he stand up and say: "My name is Pond... James Pond"?
techdiff reference
It's always interesting to compare pictures. The approximate location of the article's picture of the Observatory Clock from the 1870s:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/7GSD3VytQ5cJ5ayR6
It provides a good view of Canary Wharf's skyscrappers today.
>After his death John’s third wife Maria Elizabeth (neé Last) (1811-99), a teacher by profession, was denied a widow’s pension so lobbied to take over the manual distribution to provide an income for herself and their baby daughter Elizabeth Ruth Naomi Belville (known as Ruth).
It would be interesting to know if it was common practice for widows to be denied pension, and if so, for what reason.
So is this not one of the earliest grifts?
> a teacher by profession, was denied a widow’s pension so lobbied to take over the manual distribution to provide an income for herself and their baby daughter
> she retired in 1892, at age 81
> So Ruth was forced to move, for the last time to 57 Plough Lane in Beddington. She retired in 1940 and died aged 89
The time synchronization story is carrying another ominous story about elderly working class poverty of the gilded age.
Mother and daughter working until their 80s probably due to necessity, and the daughter being forced out of her home shortly before she died.
Let's not go back.