Official Time

From The American Horologist magazine, March 1938

Official Time

"He was going twenty miles an hour," said the policeman.

"Nonsense," said the driver, "he is only guessing." 

"I had a stop watch and kept an eye on him from Webster Statue to the big Altunus tree with the crooked limb, continued the officer, that's just one block, and he made it in eight seconds. One block in two hundred and sixty-four but if he made two hundred sixty-four feet in eight seconds, he would go one thousand, nine hundred and eighty in a minute. And sixty times that would be one hundred and eighteen thousand, eight hundred feet, or twenty-two and one half miles an hour." 

"You can't beat the watch and the mathematics in," said the magistrate.

"I didn't know a policeman had to pass an examination in mathematics," remarked the automobilist as he paid his fine. 

Contributed by Jacob J. Hess.