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Boston used to have a time-ball - and it dropped every day at noon
By adamg on Sun, 12/27/2015 - 7:18pm
The Ladd Observatory takes some time to tell us about how clocks in the Boston area used to be calibrated with the dropping of the daily noon time-ball from the roof of a downtown building, first a long-gone building at Devonshire and Milk and later from what is now the Ames Hotel at Washington and Court streets.
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Comments
Any idea when this practice ended?
The linked article doesn't say.
1905
- Annual Report of the Naval Observatory for 1911, via Google Books
Interesting article
Is the Equitable Life Assurance Society building still there at Devonshire and Milk?
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so
Three of the four corners there are occupied by modern buildings. The fourth is an older building, but doesn't look anything like the one in the photo.
Long Gone
The building on the left in the photo is the US Post Office / Sub Treasury which was knocked in the 30's for the Courthouse that is there now.
The Equitable site is the northerly end of One Federal Street. The retail space there has been a copier sales place for years but used to be the great Harvard Coop location that was the first place I remember that sold CDs.
I remember that Harvard Coop
I remember that Harvard Coop on Devonshire Street in the 80s. I'm not sure why, but it didn't really last too long there.
The old building...
... that is there is the International Trust Building: https://archive.org/stream/internationaltru00mass#page/n1/mode/2up
Some interesting history on the now gone Equitable Trust building and the company behind it: http://www.boston.axa-advisors.com/History-of-the-AXA-Equitable-Boston-B...
Neat.
Now I know where the Time Square ball idea comes from. Though given the instructions now I'm going to assume that the Times Square ball is defective as it drops slowly and that they should do the real drop at 12:05:00.
I also like the line about calibrating the Boston Ball to MA State House Time -- perhaps the T uses this as well which explains a lot about the trains.
Local Sun Time?
The US didn't adopt standardized time zones until 1918, although the prime meridian was established in the 1880s (Greenwich Time).
Which "noon" did they use?