Time & accuracy

Nowadays we just assume that the time on our devices is correct, to the second … if they’re not then it’s usually because we’ve changed timezone or the clock hasn’t updated itself for summer-time. But it’s getting rarer to have to manually change a time piece to account for summer-time because most pick up internet time or radio time signals. But that wasn’t always the case even only 20 years ago. 

Hundreds of years ago we would probably have just told the time by the position of the sun or from the clock on the church tower in our village. It was less essential to “be on time”, unless it was to turn up to church, and meeting times would have been less precise – you wouldn’t have been in trouble if you were a few minutes late because finding 2 watches or clocks that told exactly the same time was less common. In fact the time in each town was often different as it was set by the position of the noon sun and this is slightly different as you move east to west across the country.

The first time that time to the minute was really important was during the arrival of the railways – making a timetable proved a nightmare when you had to know the different times in each town and being “on time” was important when you could miss your train. So for the first time “the time” was standardised across the country to make this possible.

Pocket watches of that era would be considered “good” if they only lost 20-30 seconds in a day so the owners had to remember to check them regularly by a village clock. But when the telephone network spread it finally became possible for people to call the operator or the “speaking clock” and obtain an “official” time that was kept centralised and official – it might not have been held to the millisecond but as everyone could synchronise their clocks and watches to it each day then it became the de facto “time”. 

Back to the modern day, most people still don’t check the time on their watches to the second – they might glance at it and think “Hmm, it’s about quarter to…” or think “they’re 5 minutes late!” but almost nobody needs to know the time to the second, even today. Yet still people want to buy watches that are synchronised to the millisecond to national radio transmitters of GPS satellites, so why do they do it? 

Well, of course “accuracy” is a marketing proxy for “quality” and watch makers have been selling the idea that we need the most accurate watch as a way of boasting about how good their designs and manufacturing is. The lower the accuracy, the more a person assumes that the watch is of poor quality, and so on. 

This need not be the case though, or rather the “quality” of (say) an automatic movement might be extremely high but still less accurate than a dirt cheap digital. By their nature clockwork watches can never be as accurate as basic quartz.