To the Editor of the "Nonru-Curxa Day News."
Siz,—With reference to your note to-day, the Customs clock here is the only public clock with any pretensions to real accuracy. It is checked daily by the time signals and was never, in my time, two seconds out. That clock has a heavy pendulum and varies very little. It was ordered by Sir Robert Bredon.
The worst public clock is the Race Club clock. Although I never was a member of the Race Club, yet its illumination at night is due to a suggestion of mine that it would be easy to light it at nights. Sir Robert Bredon was chairman then and he promptly got hold of mo on subject. His was nota mechanical mind and he Gould not see how. to light it, since it had not a glass dial. The simple plan of copying the Horse Guards clock in London and putting screened lamps on the out side had not occurred to him. It was promptly done. He complained bitterly to me then that the old clock was notoriously—untrustworthy. The best semi-public clock is that of Mr. H. E. Morriss, on his stables, It is so very unpretentiously mounted that the virtues of its grand movement are not suspected.
No turret clock in the world, from Big Ben downwards, was ever covered with glass. The reflexly would be awful, and the size of the glass would be startling, if in one piece. Movement compensates somehow for wind or snow pressure.
Tt may interest you to know that the French Club clock was made entirely at Sicawei. Apart from the Sicawei Observatory standard clock, which stands in a deep hole upon a concrete pillar and has air exhausted from the works, et and other precautions impracticable in private life, the best clocks here are the one at Ismer's, which goes to one tenth of second a day, and the one at the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank.
It is not commonly known that it is child's play to attach wireless receiving earpieces to any house which has a telephone. It can be done for less than five dollars ani in no way interferes with the telephone service. If the Company had a few sparks of enterprise, they would offer to contract to fit such extra to any subscriber. Wireless is sent out by Sicawei six times a day and that gives you the time the second.
There was going to be a noble clock to rival the Customs clock and be modern and accurate, Road corner of the new Municipal buildings. Foundations in that corner proved most tricky and could not stand the weight. The clock tower had to be omitted bodily. Nothing could be better as a memorial than a fine tower on the Bund. Unfortunately the best place for it would obyiously be by modifying the Semaphore tower, and as the addition would
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.