Time Is Always of the Essence for This True Clock Watcher

We were a bit late, wouldn’t you know it, for an interview with the man who pays more attention to the time than anyone in this country.

So when we entered the tiny paper-strewn office of our nation’s timekeeper, we asked just what time it was.

“This, of course, is exactly right,” he said in a heavy Austrian accent, pointing confidently to an unadorned black and white clock on the wall, the only one in the room. “You can check it.”

With that, Dr. Gernot M.R. Winkler, director of the U.S. Time Service Department, picked up the receiver of his desk phone and dialed direct to his personal ally in the quest to form a more perfect world through the synchronization of time--the master clock of the United States.

“U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock. At the tone, Eastern Daylight Time, 14 hours, 49 minutes, 38 seconds, beep. Universal Time, 18 hours 49 minutes 43 seconds, beep.”

The message coming through the receiver was clear and ungarbled. It’s exactly what Winkler expects from the master clock, a technological marvel that looks like a huge rack of audio equipment with a digital time readout and sits quietly in an environmentally controlled room about 10 paces from his office.

It’s the keeping of precise time by this clock that is responsible for maintaining order around the country. Without it, television broadcasts would interfere with each other, satellites would go haywire and planes and trains would never know when to arrive.

My watch, a relatively inexpensive timepiece with a degree of accuracy that doesn’t even merit mention in comparison with the master clock, said it was about 2:53 p.m. It was just a little fast, we learned, after receiving a couple of quick lessons in the more simple intricacies of the telling of time from the master himself--the Time Lord, as Winkler’s son has dubbed him.

- Lesson One: The master clock tells time on a 24-hour system, widely used by the military and radio communications and scientific community. That means the day goes from 00:00 to 23:59.

- Lesson Two: The world is broken into 24 time zones, so everybody has sunlight at noon and darkness at midnight. Of the 24 time zones, the United States is located in eight. Universal time is the time at the Greenwich meridian, the prime meridian from which all time zones radiate. The meridian passes through London.

Those are the easy lessons, we were soon to discover.

We traveled to the U.S. Naval Observatory, located on 75 acres in the northwest corner of the District of Columbia, which oversees the enormous task of keeping precise time. Vice President Dan Quayle lives in an aging mansion on these grounds, and his tennis court is within view of the tiny time service building housing Winkler, his small staff and his master clock.

Winkler, 67, is a physicist and an astronomer who has been managing the time service department for nearly a quarter of a century. Time is a passion for this serious man, who speaks of his “aesthetic attraction” to things precise.

Taking off his glasses and fidgeting with them, Winkler sat back in his thickly padded desk chair and looked over a desk full of paper. Then he matter-of-factly explained that the first thing we needed to understand about time is that there is no such thing.

“The simplest thing to explain what time is is to explain that it is just an idea which we developed from change, and the abstract measure of that change is time,” said Winkler with authority. “It’s really a human invention.”

The nature of time also makes it a subject ideal for humor. The temptation to make a joke with every detail is so great, we discerned the answers to our most burning questions about time early in the interview.

No, Winkler is very rarely late (he thinks it’s “tactless and impolite”), he doesn’t work around the clock, nor does he watch the clock all day to pass the time.

He does have a theory of how to get more time in the day:

“By not doing nonsense, useless things. Reading 99% of what is printed today. Listening to 99% of what people tell you.

“In other words, by restricting yourself to the really valuable things, you have a big amount of time. You can be very well read by reading very little. Just don’t fill your mind with garbage. That’s the only way with which you can gain time. And a very effective one.”

Winkler said people take time for granted and don’t really understand what the impact would be if time were not coordinated precisely.

“The use of time is much more widespread than people realize. You may not know, for instance, that every television station operates on an atomic clock,” which can be accurate to one second in every 300,000 years.

“All the television stations, all the power stations, all the public services are very closely synchronized. If you drive an airplane, the systems that support that are very tightly synchronized. What we do is clear up the problems in all these stations in which we are in constant connection.”

Part of Winkler’s job is to make adjustments to the clocks about once a year to synchronize the time determined by the rotation of the Earth with the time kept by the atomic clock. The Earth’s rotation is not constant and slows over a period of time, so one second must be added to the master clock annually to synchronize the two. Called a leap second, it is based on the same principal as the leap day, which occurs once every four years. The leap day is necessary to synchronize the calendar year with the solar year, which also is slightly variable because of the inconsistency of the Earth’s rotation.

Winkler and his staff also provide astronomical data obtained from a variety of very sophisticated telescopes that measure the positions and movement of cosmic objects for use in navigation, space travel and scientific research.