
Why Edinburgh's clock is almost never on time - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180913-scotlands-clock-thats-almost-never-on-time
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Waterluvian
If a clock is always off by three minutes, people will just adapt.

What if they make it off by 3 minutes a random 50% of the time? Then people
can't adapt and half the time they'll be "helped" with extra time.

Kind of useless in modern times but an interesting problem to think about.

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ams6110
I don't know. I use the same technique at home. I keep the clocks a few
minutes fast, and even though I know that they are fast I find that it does
help getting out of the house on time for the morning school run, etc.

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Markoff
how do you schedule calls, online meetings?

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kevinpet
Maybe he schedules them for when he's in the office?

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userbinator
I thought it would be related to solar time vs. local time, but an inspection
of [http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-
around-t...](http://blog.poormansmath.net/how-much-is-time-wrong-around-the-
world/) reveals that Edinburgh's solar time would actually be around 15
minutes behind its local time.

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dmckeon
tl;dr When the North British Station Hotel opened in 1902, the railway company
wanted to give passengers 3 extra minutes to catch their trains.

Related: [https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/27000/why-
does-e...](https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/27000/why-does-
edinburgh-castles-one-oclock-gun-fire-at-1pm-instead-of-say-noon)

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labster
More tl;dr: the clock outside Edinburgh Waverley station only displays the
correct time on New Years Eve, and no one wants it to read the correct time
because it's a Scottish tradition now.

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gweinberg
Doesn't every bar on the planet do something like this?

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helpfulTroll
I was really hoping it would be something more like, because there's a
mechanical flaw that causes the clock to run slow, and it takes three minutes
reach the belfry of the clock tower from, the street. This means that when the
clock master notices that the clock is running on time, he has three minutes
to reach the belfry, and set the clock forward three minutes, so that it never
runs slow enough to make people late.

Or something like that.

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saagarjha
The same could be said about a stopped clock :)

