Now you can buy an electric clock that syncs up to WWVB fairly inexpensively ($30 or so) and WWVB's digital signal has a DST bit that is set/unset when the changes occur. The clock I have does wind itself forward 1 hour in the Spring, and 11 hours in the Fall. There is also a switch to ignore DST for areas that don't change their clocks, and of course, a switch to select which timezone. Still, nothing nearly as nicely made as those old Western Union clocks.
Bill Ranck Blacksburg, Va.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: But there is a nice type of clock now which capitalizes on the Western Union cream-colored face and logo. It is an analog style clock with a sweep second hand and it runs on the radio signal sent out from WWV. It uses one AA battery (good for about a year). A very interesting time piece.I also seem to recall that when I went to high school, there was a state law (pertaining to government buildings) saying that all government buildings had to remain on STANDARD time year around. So the school clocks did not change to the new time, but continued to show the old time. The school said we would be starting school one hour later for the remainder of the school year. Normally, I think we started at 8:30 AM and got out at 3:30 PM. So we went to school from
9:30 until 4:30 each day therefter to agree with the school clocks which read 8:30 -> 3:30. (That would have been most of April, all of May and the first week of June.) But when we went back to school that fall (we always started the Tuesday after Labor Day) we just ignored the wall clocks, which seemed to us to be one hour slow. At some point in late October, the school clocks began agreeing with us once again. That only happened the one year; I think the next year the legislators changed the rules on government buildings. PAT]