Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [12]
The Noon Signal: A Speculative Tale
THESE ARE THE AVAILABLE FACTS REGARDING THE Clementinum’s Astronomical Tower: it is the pale yellow of butter pecan ice cream; the eight-sided cupola at its apex boasts a wraparound balcony with a gracefully curved railing and a Baroque statue of Atlas; the tower’s windows are numerous, vary in shape and size, and include four that are perfectly round and vaguely nautical; for eighty-six years the tower was the source of Prague’s noon. This last piece of data is supplied by a spare chronology of the noon signal, unceremoniously affixed to an inner wall of the tower, within a small chamber that serves as a museum for old astronomical equipment. Like so many of the best aspects of Prague this brief biography provides just scant enough information to ignite the imagination.
With modernity, noon has been reduced to a mere number, signifying but no longer representing the moment the sun reaches its zenith in the sky. Local accuracy has been replaced by global synchronization. Barely a century ago, however, noon was still determined by the sun, and in Prague it was determined in the Astronomical Tower’s Meridian Room. The Meridian Room was a dark chamber with a small hole bored in its southern wall. A string ran across this room, representing Prague’s meridian. When the sun’s narrow beam passed through this hole and crossed the string, the sun had reached its zenith: noon had arrived.
By 1842 Prague had become a large and prosperous city with many bell towers, all purporting to ring in noon, but until then there had been no coordination of these bells, and so on the order of the High Burgrave of the Kingdom of Bohemia, a public noon signal service was begun. As noon approached on the morning of July 20, the city’s bellmen observed as a flag was hung from the Clementinum tower. A few minutes before noon this first flag was replaced by a smaller one. When sunlight gilded the string in the darkened chamber below, the flag was withdrawn. The church bells rang. Noon had come to Prague.
The historical record states that the first noon signal was given by the director of the Clementinum’s observatory, but certainly the director would have had more important things to do than give the signal on each subsequent day. It seems reasonable to assume that a regular signalman was retained, but the sparse history posted within the astronomical tower neglects to mention such a man.
According to a centuries-old legend the city’s most illustrious rabbi, Rabbi Loew, once fashioned a golem out of Prague’s clay. To create a signalman from ink, then, is a comparatively modest undertaking. Jii lived in a small cottage in the Clementinum’s shadow. A widower with a young son, Jii did odd jobs around the Clementinum compound. He was a proud, meticulous fellow who dressed neatly, cleaned under his fingernails before every meal, and was scrupulously punctual. For twenty years, Jii executed his tower duty with precision, never missing a noon. Though the signal flag was but one of Jii’s various functions, it was the only one he held dear. Standing atop the tower, feeling the eyes of the city upon him as he waited for the precise moment at which to withdraw the second flag, Jii became a man of singular importance, a man upon whom all of Prague depended. His displeasure at the change imposed in 1866—when the two-flag method was determined to be too elaborate and noon’s arrival was demoted to a single waving flag—would have been understandable. After twenty years of faithful service, to be demoted to just one flag! In tendering