[time-nuts] PBS, Tue evening, The Secret of Tuxedo Park

Tom Van Baak tvb at LeapSecond.com
Tue Jan 16 10:04:17 EST 2018


I can't stress enough how important Loomis was to the history of precise timekeeping in early radio, telephone, pendulum clock, quartz oscillator era. And for those of us who still have Loran-C receivers can thank him (Loomis Radio Navigation -> LRN -> Loran).

So I highly recommend the 2003 book "Tuxedo Park" by Jennet Conant:
http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Tuxedo-Park/Jennet-Conant/9780684872889

Our kind of guy. In the "Palace of Science" chapter she writes: Loomis would remain a "time nut" for the rest of his life, according to Luis Alvarez, who recalled that Loomis always wore "two Accutrons--one on his right wrist and one on his left wrist." He would check them every day against WWV (the standard frequency broadcasting station of the National Bureau of Standards), and if one was gaining a half second on the other, he would wear it on the outside of his wrist instead of the inside, so that gravity changed the rate of the tuning fork and the two watches tracked each other, and WWV, "to within less than a second a day."



Some other Loomis links of interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Lee_Loomis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN
https://timeandnavigation.si.edu/navigating-air/navigation-at-war/new-era-in-time-and-navigation/alfred-loomis
http://www.ob-ultrasound.net/loomis.html
http://leapsecond.com/pages/loomis/


And the clever way to do time transfer and compare precision clocks to 1 ms in the 1930's...

http://leapsecond.com/pend/shortt/1931-RAS-Precise-Measurement-Time-Loomis.pdf


Also the classic "The Evolution of the Quartz Crystal Clock" by Warren A. Marrison:

https://ieee-uffc.org/about-us/history/uffc-s-history/the-evolution-of-the-quartz-crystal-clock/
via https://ieee-uffc.org/about-us/history/uffc-s-history/
and original at https://archive.org/details/bstj27-3-510


If someone knows how to record any time/clock/navigation parts of PBS show for non-US viewers let me know, off-list.

/tvb


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hal Murray" <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>
To: <time-nuts at febo.com>
Cc: "Hal Murray" <hmurray at megapathdsl.net>
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2018 1:42 AM
Subject: [time-nuts] PBS, Tue evening, The Secret of Tuxedo Park


> (Sorry for the clutter to those of you outside the US.)
> 
> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/secret-tuxedo-park/
> Two of the shorts mentions time.
> 
> Many thanks for the Tuxedo Park book suggestion many years ago.
> 
> 
> -- 
> These are my opinions.  I hate spam.
> 



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