Athletics and Football (extract)

ATHLETIC MEETINGS 207 motion of the bodiys fallacious, as one runner usubaellgyins to moveperceptibly before tohtehers. Besides these complications, there is the further set of diffi­ culties created by the watchitself, though with the splendid pieces of mechanism which are now made expressly for this purpose the uncertainty is minimised. The dial otfhe stop­ watch uissually marked into fifths,and with some tohfe older watches there was this fact to be considered : the hand 'jumped' from fifth to fifth round the dial, there being of course a fifth of a second between each jump. Obviously, therefore, there might be almost a whole fifthof difference between two occasionswhen the same time was registered on the dial. For instance, upon one occasion when 10^ was registered on the dial, the hand might, just at the instant before the watch stopped, have made its jump to the fifth, while upon the otheorccasion the hand might have stopped at an infinitesimal period before it took its jump to thetwo- fifths mark upon the dial. It is clear, therefore, that, as a good sprinter travels a shade over two yards in a fifth of a second at the end of a hundred yards race, two men might each have been fairtliymed 1a0t^ seconds in a race,although the one watswo yards in frontof the other. As for a very long timtheere wenroething wbauttches whjiuchmped fifths even at first-class meetings, it is obvious that raesgards the times made thaet se meetings, they arqeuite untrustwortahsy to one-fifthof a second's variation. At thepresent day there are some watches (although there are not many belonging to private individuals, their cost being large) which, at any rate as far as the human eye can distinguish, travel evenly over the dial. As amatter faocft, the wheewlhich regulates the motion has such small cogs that the jumps are divided into twenty or thirty per second. The hand, therefore, can really be stopped at any place on the dial between the fifths, and the dial then has to be surveyed through a magnifying- glass, and a conclusion arrived at how far it has travelled between one fifthand another.