Written by Carmelo Amalfi Tuesday, 01 September 2009 08:25
IN 1896, the WA’s first Government Astronomer, William Ernest Cooke, prepared to standardise colonial time using detailed observations of the Sun and the stars.
Noon in Perth would soon be noon in Fremantle. Trains would run on time. And New Year’s Eve revellers would celebrate at the same time.
Until 1944, when time signals were calibrated with Mt Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, the responsibility for keeping time in WA belonged to Perth Observatory, then located next to King’s Park.
In the bustling port of Fremantle, a simple timekeeping method included a small “timeball”, situated on top of a shed near the lighthouse at Arthur’s Head.
Cooke connected the ball to his clock, transmitting a signal at 1pm each day, except Sunday, and the ball dropped. According to the late Perth Observatory honourary historian Muriel Utting, “…this was the benefit of shipping, in that they could, at last, set their chronometers by the ball drop.”
The timeball itself was five feet wide and consisted of skeleton ribs of thin iron covered in canvas painted black. Attached to a 25-foot mast, the ball dropped when Perth Observatory’s signal arrived at 1pm, the margin of error not amounting to, “more than one fifth of a second”.
The time was recorded when the ball descended, not when it reached the bottom (The first time ball was erected at Portsmouth, UK, in 1829 by its inventor and Royal Navy captain Robert Wauchope).
Unfortunately, ship crews were known to tamper with the timeball while boys climbed on to the shed roof.
Cooke also placed aWA’s first public clock at the observatory gate opposite the entry to King’s Park. And a small cannon.
As the ball dropped in Fremantle, Cooke’s old-fashioned muzzle-loading gun overlooking Perth would be fired at 1pm – a practice used at observatories around the world.
Cooke stuffed the cannon with newspaper, charged it with gunpowder, and then bang – the signal giving people the time of day, not to mention a fright.
“The consequent explosion showered the grounds of Parliament,” Utting writes in her definitive history of the state’s oldest scientific body, adding that Cooke placed chicken wire around the cannon.
“It blew a hole in the wire fence.”
The gun was first fired on December 16 or 19, 1902.
However, its usefulness would not last, members of the public increasingly complaining of being startled by the blast, not to mention, “the litter of paper over Harvest Terrace and Parliament House grounds”.
By 1917, the Perth “Time Gun” was dismantled.
Utting notes in volume two of Astronomy in Western Australia 1912-1940 that the gun, “…disappeared after it had been given, as a historic piece, to a group of boy scouts.”
Cooke was also committed to bringing astronomy to a wider audience, particularly school children.
He produced several manuals on astronomy. In Elementary Practical Astronomy for Primary Schools, he points out that the manual was written, “…for the teacher, and the intention is that the students of shall take the observations themselves and realise practically the truth of every step.”
Cooke says astronomy appears to have been studied too much from books when WA’s night sky offered outstanding views and answers to some of the biggest questions in astronomy.
His ideas and innovations reflected the wish by WA’s first premier, Sir John Forrest, to bring the colony into the world of science.
Cooke was described as having, “superiority in both mathematics and astronomy and he had a zealous devotion to duty”.
Cooke put the meteorology of WA on a sound scientific footing, studied weather reports, the origin and behaviour of cyclones and intensity of earth tremors, which were recorded from the turn of the century until the middle of the 20th century.
Cooke also wrote science fiction. His other achievements included:
* A method of plotting tropical cyclones and issuing weather warnings for shipping and pearling industries
* His invention of a type of heliochronometer which could be used to determine local time and true north accurately. In 1924, the device known as a sunclock won a gold medal at the British Empire Exhibition
* Using radio signals from around the world to accurately measure longitude
