Telling the time in Dublin Port
The Dublin Time Ball sitting on top of the old Irish Lights offices in Dublin city centre. Photo National Library of Ireland
Warning - the lighthouse element of this post is minimal, but I found it interesting anyway.
In the olden days, (says he, sounding like his grandad about to embark on one of his tales demonstrating that modern life is rubbish), things we take for granted, weren't. The youngest in the family was the human remote control, photographic film had to brought to the pharmacy and a week later you could collect your 24 photographs of which at least three were black and many had thumbs encroaching on the photos; and time was quite elastic if you weren't rich enough to have a watch.
If you were going out to play football in the summer evenings, you were not told to come back by 9 o'clock because neither you, nor any of your equally grubby mates, had a watch. You were told to come back when the street lights went on. If you were late home, it didn't really matter in the great scheme of things.
For others though, living in their different world, time had to be precise. Ships docked in Dublin port needed to make sure their chronometers were exact, particularly in the very old days when they needed to cross the bar at the entrance to Dublin port to get out into the open sea. Exact timing was also vital in determining a vessel's longitude on the open sea. Waiting for the street lights to come on was too inexact a science and Dublin Port obviously recognised this. And so, like many places around the world, Dublin had a time ball.
A wha', Gay?
The time ball, which originated in Portsmouth, England, in 1829, spread around the world until scientific advancements rendered it obsolete around the 1920s. It consisted of a vertical pole located on top of a building where it could be seen by the ships in the harbour. No point in having one in Mullingar or Urlingford. On the pole was affixed a large ball which, but for all except five minutes of every day, sat at the bottom of the pole. A couple of minutes before 1pm, the ball would be raised to halfway up the pole. This would tell the ships that this visual version of the speaking clock (ask your grannies, kids, you won't believe what she tells you) would be in operation shortly.
If you were going out to play football in the summer evenings, you were not told to come back by 9 o'clock because neither you, nor any of your equally grubby mates, had a watch. You were told to come back when the street lights went on. If you were late home, it didn't really matter in the great scheme of things.
For others though, living in their different world, time had to be precise. Ships docked in Dublin port needed to make sure their chronometers were exact, particularly in the very old days when they needed to cross the bar at the entrance to Dublin port to get out into the open sea. Exact timing was also vital in determining a vessel's longitude on the open sea. Waiting for the street lights to come on was too inexact a science and Dublin Port obviously recognised this. And so, like many places around the world, Dublin had a time ball.
A wha', Gay?
The time ball, which originated in Portsmouth, England, in 1829, spread around the world until scientific advancements rendered it obsolete around the 1920s. It consisted of a vertical pole located on top of a building where it could be seen by the ships in the harbour. No point in having one in Mullingar or Urlingford. On the pole was affixed a large ball which, but for all except five minutes of every day, sat at the bottom of the pole. A couple of minutes before 1pm, the ball would be raised to halfway up the pole. This would tell the ships that this visual version of the speaking clock (ask your grannies, kids, you won't believe what she tells you) would be in operation shortly.
Just before 1pm, the ball would be raised up to the top and, at one o'clock exactly, it would start descending the six feet to the very bottom of the pole. This practice was copied around the world with the exception of the U.S. (where else?) where it denoted the time at 12 noon.
The original time ball in Dublin, which was erected probably in the late 1860s, early 1870s, used to sit on top of the old Ballast Board/Irish Lights offices on the corner of Westmoreland St and Aston Quay, next to O'Connell Bridge, from where it could be seen down the Liffey. It was 4 feet in diameter and made of bronze and it would travel six feet from the top to the bottom of the pole every day. Leopold Bloom remarks upon it in James Joyce's Ulysses, as the two people who have actually read the book will attest.
A curious thing was that, although it officially started dropping at 1pm, in Dublin, it was actually 12.35pm as, Dubliners refused to work on British time and went by the sun instead! This was abolished by our Imperial masters in 1916, when our cruel oppressors stole away 25 minutes of our God-given birthright that we had earned through our uncompromising westerliness.
Sydney Observatory - Photo by Dicklyon - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0
It was around about this time that the location of the time ball was moved, possibly because the British gunboat, the Helga, was blasting away at the city's irreplaceable architecture and moored ships couldn't see Sackville Street bridge because of the gunsmoke. It was relocated to the roof of the old 'hailing station' on Britain Quay, which ran eastwards from Sir John Rogerson Quay to the Dodder. I have no idea how it had operated when at O'Connell Bridge but in this location it was worked remotely from Dunsink Observatory, probably the best people to act as timekeepers.
A hailing station was apparently a maritime navigation or signal post where port authorities agencies identified, hailed and logged ships arriving. It was not a station where they analysed hail or sleet or other frozen precipitation. These were more usually found in places like Mullingar or Urlingford.
The time ball on Britain Quay apparently operated until 1948 when the ball was removed, present whereabouts unknown, but keep an eye out for it in car boot sales. The pole still stayed on top of the building, though ships' paid precious little notice of it and it was useless for telling the time. I have been unable to locate a photo of the time ball on the hailing station, so if anybody has one, I'd be happy to add it to this post.
The old hailing station with its non-temporal, no-ball pole. Photo Archiseek
The hailing station, despite being a listed protected structure, was pulled down, unannounced, by the Dublin Port Authority in 2007 to make way for the U2 Tower, Ireland's tallest building, which never materialised due to the financial crash. A couple of years before this, the same authority pulled down the historic lighthouse on Alexandra Quay.
Maybe we should have stuck with the Helga.
Footnote - this was the first time I had come across a time ball. I know, poorly educated. It seems they were quite common around the world and I'm presuming other Irish harbours like Waterford, Cork and Limerick had them. Most of them have disappeared though there are around sixty of them left around the world according the the Great Wikipede. In the UK, they can be found at places like Margate, Deal, Greenwich, Brighton and Leeds. (Leeds??) Apparently the Times Square, New Years Eve, descending ball thingy (never heard of that either) is modelled on the older time ball, except it hits 12 midnight when it reaches the bottom of the pole, not when it leaves the top.
Time ball on the Wellington waterfront c. 1900. Photo Wellington Harbour Board
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