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What’s the Time?


By Jacob Westergaard Madsen

Recently Danmarks Radio [Danish Broadcasting] presented plans to omit the sound of the town hall bells before the 12 o’clock News. "No longer in keeping with the times", the announcement was. Nevertheless, common time signals like the town hall bells have been a central part of the history of time since the end of the Middle Ages.


A Signal for the Ear
Bells ringing in town and in the countryside have marked the rhythm of day and of man since the end of the Middle Ages. They were ringing for divine service, calling people to work, and were of great importance to the sense of time in local communities. Dials on church and tower clocks came only later. The custom of asking "What’s the time?" can be traced back to these times.

In the last issue of MuseumsPosten we brought an article about the transition from local to national time. The national standard time was officially introduced in Denmark in 1880 as a natural consequence of the efforts of previous times to coordinate more easily the increasing amounts of communication and the growing speed. In order to coordinate the many different time tables it was essential to deal with the same time. By now the accuracy of the clocks made it worthwhile to set them precisely by each other. During the second half of the 18th century, Doctor Stuensee, physician-in-ordinary of King Christian VII, decided to do something about it.

… and for the Eye
Among the many ordinances and regulations coming from the hands of Struensee is the decision to introduce a visual time signal, which from 1772 announced noon in the capital on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Just before twelve o’clock a flag was hoisted on top of the Observatory of Copenhagen University, the Round Tower. On the stroke of 12 the flag was lowered for whole Copenhagen to see so that all watches could be set by the same time.

In 1869 the flag on the Round Tower was replaced by a very peculiar construction, the so-called time ball on top of the tower at Nikolai Church. By means of a telegraph wire and an electric device underneath the ball the staff at the observatory in the Round Tower could make the ball drop every day at 13 hours. Prior to this the ball had been hoisted half-way up a pole at 12:55 hrs, and two minutes later all the way up so that people could hold themselves in readiness to set their watches. In 1909 the time ball was moved to the gable end of the silo warehouse in the free port where it stayed until 1941.

Clocks Everywhere
During the between-war years the function of the time ball was overtaken by more recent media. Via the radio and "Miss Time" telephone service you could orientate yourself according to the exact official time all the 24 hours; not only locally, but all over the country. Today there are precise clocks everywhere. It almost requires a serious effort not to know what time it is for a longer period of the day. Many clocks are currently receiving radio signals from an atomic clock in Frankfurt – the world’s most precise type of clock.

In a society where all social and economic life is regulated by the clock, it is important to know the exact time. As the atomic clocks are going more evenly than the earth is rotating, unpunctuality can at least not be blamed on inaccurate clocks.



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