The Beginning of the Long Dash: A History of Timekeeping in Canada by Malcolm M. Thomson

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mikemarotta
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The Beginning of the Long Dash: A History of Timekeeping in Canada by Malcolm M. Thomson

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Post by mikemarotta »


I was accepted to write a biography of Robert Meldrum Stewart, Dominion Astronomer, for the upcoming 3rd edition of Springer's Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. In addition to various online resources, I bought this book from AbeBooks.

RASC Review here: https://www.rasc.ca/beginning-long-dash is an introduction to their typescript of the book in PDF.
JHA review (scanned here): http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/full/seri/JH ... 1.000.html

What impresses me the most about Stewart, so far, is his dedication to (forgive the pun) time-tested methods. Electronics was young back in 1920. The cat's-whisker crystal was the hobbyist radio, though tubes were coming on the market. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, with solid state components such as oscillating crystals becoming common, Stewart continued to rely on the pendulum. His judgement was well placed. At one point (29 November 1949) failure of the crystal system - relay failure - caused the Observatory clocks (and therfore the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) to fall 11 seconds behind.

It was in this same period of the early 20th century that radio - which Stewart advanced - replaced the telegraph. It was critical for survey crews in the huge Dominion who could now receive accurate astronomical fixes from their actual work locations, rather than some distant point with a telegraph line.

For all of those reasons and more I found it interesting that Stewart published a graphical method for obit determination of binary stars in Proceedings of the American Astronomical Society, 1927. (Harvard Astrophysical Data System here (not secure): http://cdsads.u-strasbg.fr/full/1927PAAS....5..276S )

Graphical methods in mechanics were typically taught to draftsmen (draughtspersons) who as skilled trades workers were not expected to know the mathematics of vectors. It was also true that these compass-and-straightedge methods would allow an engineer or scientist to get a first-order approximation, similar to the 3-digit estimates of a sliderule before plunging into the more exacting arithmetic.

It speaks to Stewart's range of interests. He led the most modern efforts of his day to create and improve an accurate celestial timekeeping system for the Dominion. He also remained aligned on the methods that were known to work.
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Michael E. Marotta
Astro-Tech 115 mm APO Refractor Explore Scientific 102 mm f/6.47 Refractor Explore Scientific 102 mm f/9.8 Refractor Bresser 8-inch Newtonian Reflector Plössls from 40 to 6 mm Nagler Series-1 7mm. nonMeade 14 mm. Mounts: Celestron AVX, Explore Twilight I Alt-Az, Explore EXOS German Equatorial
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