[LEAPSECS] 29 leaps in 3 years

[Steve Allen]

For a look at the bad old days, before coordination, see the plot of
WWV w.r.t. UT2 in figure 1 of
http://tf.nist.gov/general/pdf/1681.pdf
Yes, that's 29 leaps in a span of 3 years.

Note that the plotted frequency deviation is w.r.t.  one value of the
US Frequency Standard, and other publications detail the changes which
were made to that frequency, so that is not necessarily close to the
present frequency of TAI.  For accumulating intervals, leap seconds
are much easier.

Also, the only conceivable "correct" time scale for the broadcasts is
UT2, a belief which was amplified by the CCIR with its Rec.  374 in
1963 and 374-1 in 1966.

As such, the notion of leap seconds was so far away from the existing
CCIR Rec that they did not update 374 to specify them.  Instead they
created a whole new Recommendation 460.  That original recommendation
makes it clear that as early as 1970 the CCIR recognized the relevance
of the difference between atomic time and universal time, and they
specified that the broadcasts should follow universal time.

--
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