Time-Nutters-- This particular 1903 Railroad self-setting/winding pendulum regulated clock needed only an hourly signal from a Western Union telegraph line to provide momentary closure of a relay contact. This supplied +3 VDC to rewind the spring and also reset the sweep seconds hand on the hour, every hour.
From what I have learned about this, the resetting of the sweep seconds hand is mechanically coordinated to occur when the pendulum is at either end of its swing. It appears that is no way (that I know of) to guarantee that the "telegraphed" reset pulse would coincide with either end of the pendulum's travel. Apparently, the resetting of the sweep seconds hand will only occur within the time frame of any single pendulum swing. I suppose this means that the clock might be in error by as much as nearly one swing of the pendulum because it has to reach the end of its swing before the second hand is reset. Just guessing here, but I am thinking that all this clock needs is a 1-second long closure of a relay contact on the hour, every hour. I don't think that leap-seconds are an issue here as the clock can be manually adjusted for that whenever a leap second occurs. So-- it comes back to counting 3600 one-second pulses from a GPS clock...? Or am I missing something here...? Mike Baker ******************** _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
