THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT  
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Monday, November 20, 1995              TAG: 9511171323
SECTION: DAILY BREAK              PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER 
                                             LENGTH: Medium:   53 lines

TIME BOMB: YOU'LL NEVER BE LATE AGAIN WITH AN ATOMIC CLOCK

THE VOICE THAT helps synchronize America's clocks is what you'd expect it to be: deep-throated, assured. As the U.S. Naval Observatory's Master Clock ticks in the background, the voice resonates: ``At the tone, Eastern Standard Time, 10 hours, 29 minutes, 20 seconds.''

Beep.

For decades, the Washington lab's recorded beep every five seconds has set the nation's time. It's a phone call away (202-653-1800) if you want to reset your favorite timepiece. Or in a few years you can do what the lab and the nation's big communications companies have done: get an atomic clock.

Don't be surprised if your 1997 holiday catalog from Sharper Image features this breakthrough gift idea. For somebody who has everything, the Swiss clock company Wittnauer is already imagining atomic mantel designs.

Likely price: $1,000 and up. And Geiger counters need not be included. Atomic clocks aren't radioactive. The term atomic derives from the clock's operating principle.

Put simply, the clock makes certain atoms (most typically cesium) oscillate - keeping an electronic circuit open at a specific radio frequency. That frequency lends atomic clocks their precision. The U.S. Master Clock, set by averaging the times of 24 atomic clocks, is accurate to 1 billionth of a second per day, for instance.

Atomic clocks may become common - as novelty items and in Global Positioning Systems and cellular phones, too - thanks to recent advances at a Pittsburgh lab.

Using a microscopic laser within a computer chip to stir cesium atoms, Westinghouse Electric Corp. scientists reduced an atomic clock to a walnut's size, 10 times smaller and 100 times lighter than any current atomic time standard.

Irving Liberman, Westinghouse's time standards program manager, predicted the advance will cut costs for atomic clocks by 90 percent within a decade. He said the clocks - already critical for synchronizing signals in the nerve centers of major communications networks - will now become standard in cell phones and in the GPS receivers that boaters use to fix their positions, as well as in airplanes, missiles and tanks.

All of which should make communications clearer, war-fighting more deadly accurate, and finding one's favorite fishing spot a whole lot easier in the next millennium. ILLUSTRATION: Drawing by John Earle

by CNB