Excerpt from Time and Frequency Users Manual This book is about time and frequency. It describes time interval, time of day, and frequency calibrations. It explains the time and frequency broadcast services that are available in the United States and other countries, and how you can use them. Your requirements may be as modest as setting your watch, or as involved as calibrating precision oscillators. In either case, you should find something of interest in this book. Without realizing it, we use time and frequency every day. Knowing the correct time allows us to function in an orderly manner. We need to know what time to meet a friend for lunch, or to arrive at school or work} It's all right to get to church early, but it's embarrassing to walk in during the sermon. And we'd all be disappointed if we missed our airplane after months of planning a Hawaiian vacation. In these examples, knowing the correct time to within a few minutes is usually adequate. But even a few seconds can sometimes be quite important. For instance, every day hundreds of people drop nickels, dimes, and quarters into parking meters, coin-operated washers and dryers, and other machines that keep time. Businesses pay thousands of dollars for the use of a computer's time. We all pay telephone bills based on the time we spend using the telephone. These activities all require accurate time. Fifteen minutes on a parking meter should really be 15 minutes and not 14. An error in the meter's timer could mean a parking ticket. If we talk on the telephone for 7 minutes, we don't want to be billed for 9 or 10. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.