Richard Clark wrote:
On Mon, 15 Oct 2007 09:06:49 -0700, Jim Lux
wrote:


hear the tocks fairly clearly and even understand the voice. (Who
knew the announcer's phrase for UTC "Coordinated Universal Time"?).

UTC is not an acronym. It's a madeup identifier that matches neither
the English (Coordinated Universal Time) or the French (T U C.. I won't
even attempt to figure out what it is..).


Hi All,

In fact, UTC is an acronym (already anticipated by Frnak and
explicitly stated every minute). It is but one of several, this one
being rather genericized (because any longer would force a lot of
talking, and minute passes by pretty quickly). The others would
include: UTC(NIST), UT1; and the academic UT0, and UT2.

Au contraire...
while UT1, UT0, and UT2 are, in fact, acronyms of a sort, primarily
based on astronomical time, this is not the case for UTC..

the coordination has to do with matching up UT and TAI (atomic) time..
all those leap seconds, etc.

As one online source puts it:
The (Bureau Internationale de l'Heure) BIH was charged with the task of
monitoring and maintaining the program and introduced the term Temps
Universel Coordinné or Coordinated Universal Time for the coordinated
time scale in 1964.

BIH is the predecessor of the current BIPM (who seem to have a problem
with the standard kilo losing mass) http://www.bipm.org/


or, for more information:
http://syrte.obspm.fr/journees2004/PDF/Arias2.pdf

which says: The name of Coordinated Universal Time UTC appeared in CCIR
documents in the early 60s.

One might also seek a paper from 1964, by Guinot. (who was a time guy at
the BIH back then)

A paper by Dennis McCarthy at USNO on "Evolution of Time Scales"
mentions in Section 6 that: the term "Coordinated Universal Time" was
introduced in the 1950s to designate a time scale in which the
adjustments to quartz crystal clocks were coordinated among
participating laboratories in the US and UK.


A more recent paper by Guinot says:
"Until 1965, the more or less common scale for emission of signals,
which had received spontaneously the name of Coordinated Universal Time
(UTC), had not been strictly defined."



The reason for the initials order is that there is an hidden comma.
Universal Time, Coordinated.

Funny, thing, though, that if one searches the literature of the time
for that particular sequence of words, it never occurs..

Given that Coordinated Universal Time existed well before UTC, I suspect
that the comma thing is a post hoc creation.


Wikipedia reports this as an erroneous
expansion, but Wikipedia wasn't there in my Metrology classes (a
couple dozen miles from NBS) where we worked with these NBS standards.
It wasn't there when (1974) I performed the second leap second on my
Cesium Beam Standard which was calibrated through WWVB (taking about
half an hour, part of which was waiting during the roughly 15 minute
intervals between TOCs). My antenna was so far away (on the fantail
of the ship in another "time zone"), that I had to slip the time by
100nS.