It sounds beautiful: Fountains of atoms. Wouldn’t it be neat to watch the Cesium Atomic Clock better known as NIST-F1, at work? Located at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder Colorado, the atomic clock helps define Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the official world time.

So where’s the fountain? As the atoms move through the cesium oscillator they are gently tossed in the air and gravity brings them back down in a free fall “fountain” of atoms. The movement of atoms through the oscillator can be measured, much like a pendulum measures the time in a Grandfather clock. The process involves moving the atoms into a ball, tossing them, and letting gravity carry them back down through microwaves. The microwaves affect the atoms and cause them to glow. This process is repeated until most of the atoms are affected then the fluorescence is measured. The cesium oscillator is what makes ultra-precise time keeping possible.

The first atomic clock was developed in 1949. The NIST-F1 was built in less than four years by Jefferts and Meekhof of the Time and Frequency Division of NIST’s Physics Laboratory in Colorado. Our future is on time. Almost 20 million years from now the atomic clock will not be off, even by one second.

Measuring atomic time began in 1949. What did we do before that? The Egyptian’s used sundials and they had equations and time standards, while other cultures developed different time measurement systems. Around 300-100 BCE, the Babylonians used division to measure time. This is the source that we use to measure our “modern” minutes and seconds.

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