[LEAPSECS] reading material

[Steve Allen]

Lest we be doomed to repeat history, I just love bibliography

As of the late 19th century the railroads were contracting with
various observatories (presumably in order to conserve precious
telegraphic bandwidth) to supply standard time for various regions.
The first Publication of the Lick Observatory contains a description
of the technologies employed, and our clock still ticks up there on
the mountain (there's just no telegraph connected to it anymore).

Prior to coming to California, our own first director had been
involved in such notions
http://www.philsoc.org/2001Spring/2130minutes.html

A NYTimes article probably from 1891-04-05 in which we find
astronomers objecting that the USNO and Western Union planned to
centralize the telegraphic time signals.
(Bandwidth not so precious anymore?)
http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:voViX3WOhuIJ:query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html%3Fres%3DF00E17FF3D5E10738DDDAC0894DC405B8185F0D3

I suspect this article covers this history in more detail
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url

By 1905 the USNO's time business was the subject of popular articles
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1905tim.htm

And by 1913 the USNO's radio broadcasts were also hailed as keeping
time accurate to 1/20 second across the US
http://earlyradiohistory.us/1913tim.htm

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory        Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
University of California    Voice: +1 831 459 3046           Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064        http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/     Hgt +250 m