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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Erwin Schrödinger published a paper titled “The present situation in quantum mechanics” on this date in 1935 in which he presented a thought experiment in a joking way that involved a box that contained a vial of poison, some radioactive uranium, a Geiger counter … and a cat. Happy birthday to Schrödinger’s cat, always simultaneously dead and alive.

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The New York Yankees signed free agent outfielder Reggie Jackson to a five-year, $2.96 million contract 40 years ago today.
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… So that how it can be that a stone, a plant, a star, can take on the burden of being; and how it is that a child can take on the burden of breathing; and how through so long a continuation and cumulation of the burden of each moment one on another, does any creature bear to exist, and not break utterly to fragments of nothing: these are matters too dreadful and fortitudes too gigantic to meditate long and not forever to worship …—James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941

James Agee was born on this date in 1909.

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San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot and killed by a disgruntled former city supervisor while at work in City Hall on this date in 1978.
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