Clock to End Clocks

A monster electronic clock, the last word in precision timers, went into operation last week at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. The secret of the new clock's accuracy is a set of four quartz crystals, about the size of matchbooks, which vibrate in controlled temperature vacuum chambers at 100,000 cycles per second. Their function: to control the pulses of current which drive the mechanism. Working together with 600 electron tubes, the crystals operate with a margin for error of about one part in a billion.

From Murray Hill the new clock's time signals will be distributed over the U.S. by the wires of the Bell System. They will govern radio and television stations, coaxial cables, even the operations of power networks. Bell's time clock will be checked periodically against the time of the U.S. Naval Observatory and the National Bureau of Standards. But no one expects that the three will ever get far out of step. Estimated variation in the Bell timer: one second in 30 years.

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