The Gad About Town

“To be a king is to inherit old ideas and genealogy. I don’t want to descend from anyone.”—Napoleon Bonaparte

On this date in 1804, Napoleon was crowned (or crowned himself) Emperor Napoleon 1 of France, because he did not want to be merely king.

The crown was one that had been designed for him, as the crown worn by the King of France was destroyed during the French Revolution. As Pope Pius VII brought it forward, he took the crown from the pope’s hands and placed it on his head himself, in order to forestall any potential papal claim over his throne. In November, French voters had approved Napoleon’s new constitution, which named him emperor, by a 99.93% to 0.07% margin.

Napoleon then crowned his wife, Joséphine, empress.
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The Great Train Robbery, a film directed by Edwin S. Porter for Edison Studios, was first shown at Huber’s Museum in New York City in 1903 on this date. It is the first Western, the first action movie, the first fictional film to use on-location shooting. Made on a budget of about $150, it earned that back and more for Edison, and it rapidly became an international success: the first action movie blockbuster.

Legend has it that at the last sequence, a frame of which is seen at top, in which actor Justus Barnes takes aim at the camera and fires point blank, audience members dove for cover. Nothing that “real” had yet been seen on screen, and audiences had no training in how to watch a film. As legends go, it makes its point, but it most likely never happened: no contemporary accounts describe audiences in panic.
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Every minute on the minute, twenty-four hours a day, every day, a chime is heard and an unidentified male voice announces the time. This is the bulk of a day’s programming for radio station WWV, which operates on five radio bands: 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 MHz. A ticking sound is also heard throughout the day; this sound is an audio version of a clock’s second hand. This audio clock is calibrated to the U.S. government’s atomic clocks so that anyone tuning in to WWV can set their own clocks by the radio broadcast.

WWV is the oldest continuously operated radio station in the United States; it was launched in May 1920. Its operations are a part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the branch of our government that measures things. Until 50 years ago today, the radio station and transmitter were headquartered in Maryland, but at precisely midnight December 1, 1966, WWV switched its broadcast to a new transmitter in Fort Collins, Colorado, a location that every device in America that sets its own time knows intimately. This new location brought the station transmitter so much closer to our nation’s atomic oscillators that its time measurements and announcements were brought ten times closer to true time.
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