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Originally Posted by TenFour
I'm old enough to have navigated across oceans with nothing but a sextant, a nautical almanac, and sight reduction tables (look it up). Having accurate time was critical, so we had a special chronometer onboard that would periodically be synced with the time signal still broadcast by WWVB in Colorado. Listening for that time signal and then syncing the chronometer was critical since being off by even one second could put your navigation off significantly. Needless to say, we all had mechanical watches back then and I grew up learning to wind my watch first thing each morning. You might see soldiers in old movies syncing their watches by pulling out the stem, setting their watches to an exact time, then all pushing the stems back in at the same instant in order to guarantee each soldier was operating on the same time.
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Being a retired sailor, we had to know the old methods.
One of the ship's Quarter Masters would visit all the spaces each day on the ship that had chronometers installed and would wind them and set them to the master time from the chronometer he carried. We always did a time check before a major evolution. Not sure what they do these days. It's an art that is slowly fading away with the new Navy.