TIME stood still in Britain last week—so still that some had to be imported from the US. The reason? The government-run atomic clock that acts as Britain’s official timekeeper had to be taken off the air for more than a week.
The Department of Trade and Industry pays the National Physical Laboratory £500,000 a year to create and broadcast Britain’s official time signal 24 hours a day, from a radio station in Rugby, Warwickshire. Called MSF—the abbreviation’s meaning has been lost in the depths of history—the signal is used by hundreds of thousands of businesses, broadcasters and self-correcting clocks.…
