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National Jeweler - October 1, 2001
A New Atomic Age?
By Norma Buchanan
“This train is being held due to a delay in
service,” announces the crackling voice over the
public-address system. Most New York subway riders
have heard this tautological nonexplanation for
tardy trains so many times they don’t even snicker
anymore. But relief may be in sight. Earlier this
year, the city’s transportation department said it
was thinking about buying 1,000 radio-controlled
watches to help its employees improve the trains’
on-time performance.
As
we all know, the New York subway system’s movers and
shakers are hardly famous for their bold, ahead-of
–the-curve stance toward technological advances.
But in this instance, they just may have lurched
(inadvertently, perhaps) into the next big high-tech
timekeeping thing. Radio-controlled watches, those
incredibly precise timekeepers that adjust
themselves nightly to the U.S. government’s atomic
clock in Boulder, Colo., may be destined for an
audience wider than the technophiles and gadget
geeks who have been their main fans until now. A
new age in timekeeping may be at hand.
Here’s why:
·
More
companies are making radio-controlled watches these
days. Since the German company, Junghans, launched
the first radio-controlled watches in the United
States in 1996, the government agency that maintains
the Boulder atomic clock and broadcasts its signal
from Fort Collins, Colo., has boosted the signal’s
strength twofold so that it can be picked up much
more easily than before. This has brought more
players into the radio-controlled watch arena, says
Lee Hafemann, who is in charge of sales of
radio-controlled timepieces at La Crosse Technology,
La Crescent, Minn.
Until the late 1990’s,
only Junghans (whose U.S. office is now in Pompano
Beach, Fla.) had the technology to make
radio-controlled watches that work in this country,
Hafemann said. Now there are a handful of companies
offering them, including La Crosse and Chaney
Instrument, based in Lake Geneva, Wis., which sells
the Atomix brand.
·
Prices for
radio-controlled watches have come down
dramatically. Radio- controlled watches—also
called “atomic” watches—used to cost hundreds of
dollars. Now you can get one for $50 or $60.
(Radio-controlled clocks are also available for a
song--$30 or less.) Hong Kong companies have
started to offer radio-controlled timepieces. That
means more inexpensive models are probably on the
way.
·
Consumers
are getting accustomed to reading and hearing about
atomic timekeeping, which is used, for instance, in
Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. The GPS
satellites that transmit position information are
equipped with atomic clocks. Some sports-utility
vehicles are now equipped with radio-controlled
clocks. These timekeepers are also being used
increasingly in mass transportation
applications—synchronizing stoplights, for instance.
The more people are
exposed to atomic timekeeping, the more likely
they’ll want it on their wrists, especially when
they realize atomic watches spring forward and fall
back automatically when daylight-saving time comes
and goes.
·
Scientists
have developed an atomic clock that’s even better
than the ones now in use. Current atomic clocks
measure time according to the oscillations of cesium
atoms. The best ones are accurate to within an
amazing one second every 20 million years. Earlier
this year, scientists at the National Institute of
Standards and Technology, the agency that maintains
the Boulder atomic clock, announced they had
developed a clock that uses a mercury ion as its
time base and has the potential to be 100 to 1,000
times more accurate than cesium clocks. If and when
the clocks come into use, which would surely be a
much-ballyhooed event, the gee-whiz appeal of
radio-controlled timepieces—one of their chief
assets—will take a quantum leap. (The mercury
clocks wouldn’t have any practical effect on the
watches’ precision, which is limited by factors
other than the accuracy of the atomic clock sending
the signal.)
In light of all of this,
it’s reasonable to think America may catch up or
even surpass Germany where, atomic-timepiece-makers
claim, 10 percent of the watches and 30 percent of
the clocks sold have radio-controlled movements.
We hope so. The
country will be better off for it, in ways large and
small. Think of the Wisconsin bartender slapped
with a $161 ticket for keeping her tavern open two
minutes after state law required that it close. Her
lawyer argued that the ticketing police officer’s
watch could very well have been off by two minutes.
Radio-controlled watches
would solve problems like these and many others.
But can they make the subways run on time? Don’t
count on it.
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