Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Thorne End ·
The Standard of the Ninth Minute
The horology board finds every public clock in Thorne End in agreement one minute past the hour, hourly, by a margin its inspectors cannot amend away.
- filed: "before the clock inspection"
- reference: "TE/HB/13"
1. This report of the horology board concerns the public timepieces of Thorne End, being the town hall clock, the station clock, the clock over the banking hall, the school clock, and the church clock, together with the parish time signal given by suspended ballast at the harbour wall. Eleven instruments in all, of which ten are winding clocks and one is a water standard of old make, retained for its history and not its accuracy.
2. The board conducts a round of inspection each spring. The instruments are checked against the board's own portable chronometer, carried in a felt-lined case, and the findings are entered in the round book with errors given in seconds, fast or slow. The round book for the present year is appended. It is short, because there was very little to enter.
3. Every instrument was found to read one minute past the true hour at the true hour. The margin was the same at the town hall and the banking hall, at the school and the station. The harbour ballast, which is read by eye and has no dial, dropped its signal at the true minute precisely, and the board notes with care that all who watched the ballast drop wrote in their notebooks the time one minute on from the drop.
4. The finding is not that the clocks are faulty. All ten were within two seconds of one another. The finding is that they are faulty together, by the same margin, in the same direction, and that the margin is scheduled rather than accumulated. No clock that drifts gains a minute every hour with such evenness. Rather, each appears to hold off from striking by a fixed sixty seconds, hourly, deliberately, the way a clerk withholds a letter until the post is certain.
5. The board's senior inspector, Mr Lancelot Pyke, attempted correction. He set the town hall clock back by one minute at ten in the morning. By ten past, the mechanism had resumed its former reading. He set it back again under supervision, with the escapement held, and the same occurred, except that the clock this time regained its margin more slowly, as if it had been inconvenienced.
6. The station clock was next, and here the correction produced an effect the board did not expect. Adjusted to true time, the station clock struck its midday hour a full minute early as reckoned by the chronometer — that is, when corrected, the clock gave the hour at the true minute, and every soul on the platform checked a watch and found it wanting, and a porter was heard to say, before witnesses, that the station had gone strange.
7. The correction was withdrawn the same afternoon. All clocks were returned to their scheduled reading, which is to say one minute on, where they have held since without variance. The board records that it was not obliged to do this by any instrument and declined to be obliged by any person.
8. Asked in writing for the board's conclusion, Mr Pyke supplied one sentence: a standard is whatever the town agrees not to argue with, and this town has agreed the ninth minute is the hour, so the ninth minute is the hour, and my chronometer is the tourist.
9. The water standard at the harbour head, which the board had intended to exclude as ornamental, was found to require no correction. It reads one minute past at all hours, by the same reckoning as the wind clocks, though it has no escapement, no hands but one, and has been dry forty years.
10. One matter is entered last. The board means to inspect again in the autumn, and has asked the town clerk to provide warning of any local custom touching the ninth minute that the board might otherwise stumble into unprepared. The town clerk has answered that there is no custom he knows of, only that no appointment in Thorne End has ever been made for the hour itself but always for the minute after, and that he has never thought to wonder at it, and now that he has wondered at it once, he finds he cannot stop.