Clocks and clockmaking have fascinated me. It was the advent of the railways which brought about the original advances in perfect timekeeping. Before the railways, for instance, Bristol was 10 minutes behind London and there is a clock there which still shows Bristol time.
In the 1840's a railway standard time for all of England, Scotland, and Wales evolved, replacing several "local time" systems. At that time there was no practical way of communicating information about time over a distance. When the telegraph made such communication possible, it became necessary for people living in one area to agree that they would not keep their own local time, but would all keep a time based on the local standard meridian.
Through the ages. timekeeping developed from sundials to water clocks.
In the first half of the 14th century, large mechanical clocks began to appear in the towers of several large Italian cities.
Like water flow, the rate of motion in these mechanical clocks was difficult to regulate.
In 1656, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch scientist, made the first pendulum clock.
The problem with the pendulum was that in warm weather it expanded and made the clock go more slowly. Wooden pendulums were used to minimise this expansion. Small U tubes of mercury were also tried where the expansion was offset by the weight of mercury in the tube. In 1721, George Graham improved the pendulum clock's accuracy to 1 second per day by compensating for changes in the pendulum's length due to temperature variations.
These pendulum clocks were improved by quartz crystal clocks and that accuracy is now surpassed by atomic clocks.
Fortunately you don't need to know the background to the "Ultimate Time Machine" ( the UTM ) to solve the puzzle.
It was an interesting two days of caching.
On Monday morning I wanted to do nothing but I was at sixes and sevens, I seemed to have a lot of tasks to do.
Suddenly, out of the blue at lunchtime, at 12.20, I had an idea for a new puzzle cache.
I wondered whether the solution would be too easy to solve.
I figured that it probably would but it could be a fun puzzle anyway.
I set to, constructing the basics, in between the other jobs, which demanded my attention but by 9.20 that evening I thought that the plan might just work.
On Tuesday I had set my alarm clock for an early rise at 5.25 so that I could finish these other jobs before going out to place the cache.
I cleared my feet and at 2.40, managed to find a nice spot. I actually went to two or three places, which were not suitable before deciding on the final location.
This being done though, I returned home and uploaded the cache page.
The exciting bit is waiting to see if your cache is approved and fortunately, at 5.20, it was published and was listed on the geocaching site.
Now all I have to do is wait for the found logs to appear.
Happy caching, solvers - or - Happy solving, cachers.
You can check your answers for this puzzle on Geochecker.com.
