Abstract
When physicist Louis Essen demonstrated his new toy, the world's first properly functioning atomic clock, to colleagues at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington on 3 June 1955, he already knew he was about to enter history books as 'the man who killed astronomical time'. Essen's demonstration enabled a fundamental change in the way we keep time, says Peter Whibberley, senior research scientist at NFL's time and frequency group. Scientists worked on atomic clock technology since the 1930s but this clock built by the NPL was the first man-made clock that was much better at keeping time than the Earth itself. The invention enabled a plethora of now omnipresent applications such as GPS and a vast range of location, tracking and timing based applications, including network synchronisation or trading on the stock exchange.
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