How were watches/clocks synced in the old days?

In the UK we had Tim ,you rang a number from a landline and a voice told you the correct time ,it said after the 3rd beep it will be 11.38

Municipalities tended to have a prominent clock that was highly visible and/or struck the hour. Big Ben wasn't always just a tourist attraction. This was the general time. It was often checked with some regularity against sun or other astronomy, which requires corrective charts and stuff.

Some book I started had the great line ~"Man started being disciplined by clocks after clocks stopped needing to be disciplined by man."

Of course even at the dawn of railroads, time was fairly arbitrary. I've heard that each railroad ran on it's own time and, being that this was before time zones, each was based on wherever the RR company was headquartered. So a large station would have a different clock for each railroad company.

When I was young the town cryer would call the hour. 😁

Indeed. Who regulates the regulators???

Interesting. I figured way back when, your "time zone" would just be your immediate area and areas just a few miles away may be completely different if they had no way of coordinating with eachother.

There is this one famous story of the watchmaker that saw the same man stopping in front of his window early every morning until he one day went out and asked the man why he stopped every day. The man told him that he stopped to correct his pocketwatch before heading to the clock tower of the town because it was his job to adjust the time of the clock every day. The surprised watchmaker could inform the man that he did set all his watches by the clock tower....

Well, yes. Before motorized travel, "sun at highest point is noon (albeit some corrections as previously stated)" was good enough. I meant standarized time zones.

We dialed 222-2222 and got the time from a local radio station. Still works I believe. I also get WWV on shortwave with time updates. They even announced when seconds are added or subtracted to sync with the atomic clock.

Dark magick of the Night Sisters of Dathomir?

I used to use the phone # that gave the correct time at the tone. Checked and reset my watch every Saturday, never,ever noting how far off it had strayed during the week.

The good old days, when there were more important things to worry about than your watch being a few minutes fast after 7 days.

Very satanic of you 🤗

Yes, it was actually the railroads that forced standardization of time. There were a number of fatal collisions in the early days because of inaccurate timekeeping.

Eventually, each railway station had a central clock which was set by a telegraph signal from the Naval Observatory, and every crew member had to set their watch in accordance with the central clock. In old movies, you can often see the conductor checking his pocket watch right before getting on the train.

Observatories, Hence the Omega Constellation.

I see you're staying current with Ahsoka...

In my ideal storyline, as soon as Ahsoka arrives in the new galaxy, they would be immediately intercepted by a squadron of Vipers launched from the Battlestar Galactica. The Viper flight lead would be LT. Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), to which Ahsoka would reply...you look very familiar.

Nothing but the rain.....

I remember calling for the time. Do not remember the phone number.

Now that is a deep cut! Very nice

Tv guide channel.

Back before towns and cities were connected by rail there was no standard time as we see it now, every town had a big clock everyone would set their time pieces to. It wasn't uncommon for separate towns to have separate times.

I could’ve sworn there was a beep at the top of every hour during either radio station programs, or sometimes on cable TV back in the day. Then, when I was a kid watches came out that could sync to an atomic radio frequency signal.

In Canada the CBC has always done a time sync tone at noon every day on the radio. There is also a phone number for correct time here.

Call POPCORN

I remember trying to find stuff to watch by flipping through page after page of the TV guides in the local paper.

As far as I know they didn't. Each town or village in Europe that had a tower clock would use it as a reference but it was a very local reference and no attempt was made to make sure that it correlated to the time displayed on the dial of the tower's clock in the next town or city.

This wasn't much of an issue since travel across countries or cities was infrequent and often took days or weeks before trains and railroads became common.

One of my friends is the local jeweller and it's been his family's responsibility to keep my town's clock accurate. Has been for generations. Very cool imho

They were synced quite easily: The lord set it for as long as he needed income 🤷🏻‍♂️. Same during industrial revolution: The shift leader was the only one who was allowed to wear a watch but not the drones on the floor of the work shop. So he could move the hands of a watch how ever it was necessary for his orders and his income. Time and watches always had been in relation to power and income, so it was neither synced to the sun, nor to the moon nor to the tides or whatsoever has a steady rhythm but to the depth of the masters' pockets.

The quest to find a perfect time measuring was more meant for scientists and coordinate military strikes less for working drones and their lords.

We would phone tim the time .

my uncle was a Ham operator so he used the NIST Shortwave broadcast. I made sure to set my watch by his clock. The fall back was to set it to the TV. Time didn’t seem as regimented when I was young. There seemed to be a 5-10 minute grace period built into life.

There was also the noon whistle. The local volunteer fire department tested the fire siren every day at noon. You could hear that for a few miles outside of town.

Yep. Remember the speaking clock very well. 👍🏻