Atomic Clock Turns 50

karvind writes "BBC has an interesting story on the 50th birthday of atomic clocks. The first accurate caesium atomic clock was developed at the NPL in 1955 by Dr Louis Essen. And after 5 decades In September the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) used computer chip fabrication techniques to make a small atomic clock. The final development should see a battery-operated system about the size of a sugar lump. NIST also has a page on history of atomic clocks"

Comments

Lots depend on the clock now

[esconsult1]

Official US time Clock

It seems that more and more of everything is sync'd with this. My clock radio at home auto-updates, clock on the wall, the cellphones, my Linux and Mac PC's and cable box.

Only thing left are the clocks with a single AA battery on the wall, and at some point they are going to use the pervasive WWVB time signal that is broadcast from Colorado and operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology

This technology has really come a long way and is deeply embedded within our lives. Especially if you consider that before the atomic clock, time varied considerably between different locales.

Re:Setting the clock initially

[Smidge204]

That's like asking how does the "clock" in your computer get set to the right time. (Not the system clock, the crystal that generates the clock frequency the electronics operate off of).

Atomic clocks just "tick", not display an actual time. They provide an extremely reliable and high frequency tick which makes them so valuable.
=Smidge=