After unpacking and going outside and walking around for a few hours my lab tech (who is here with me for the first 4 weeks) and I decided to go to sleep early so we can get an early start the next day. However, since my Australian digital alarm clock was in my mishandled luggage at someone elses house, we had to rely on my tech's clock which was American and plugged into a voltage converter/plug adapter.
I fall asleep around 9 and, in what seems like an instant, my tech is knocking on my door telling me it is 7am. "Really?" I say, as I am incredibly groggy, and when I look out the window, I notice that it is still pitch black outside. We are both tired and confused. We eventually do some math and realize that it is not 7am, but 3am.
D'oh!
As we debated yelling at the kid down the hall blaring his stereo at 3am (who was actually drunk, so drunk that the hallway in front of his room reeked of liquor), we tried to figure out the clock problem. Clearly the digital was not working right. Luckily, Tech had a wind up clock that we set and then got up at the correct 7am.
The next morning, Tech had noticed that the digital clock was running fast. WAY fast. Like 30 seconds per "minute" fast. Then I remembered how my dad once explained to me that the alarm clock that I bought in Australia would not work in the U.S. because the electricity is so different. I thought that maybe the Tech's voltage converter would make the clock work correctly, but I wasn't sure. Which led me to think about how digital clocks work and electricity*....
So this is interesting to me (but probably is not to most others except my physics friends) and also where I get confused. I know that digital clocks are dependent upon Hz to keep time correctly. Since Australia operates on 50 Hz vs. the U.S.'s 60 Hz I would have expected the American digital clock to operate slow, not super fast.
I am thinking that the voltage converter may have effected the timekeeping capability of the clock, but I am not sure why (but it is a line converter designed for high wattage appliances such as hair dryers)....this is where my physics friends who have backgrounds in electronics will jump in and explain it all (hint, hint, nudge, nudge).
*Yes, I know I am a nerd. Didn't we already establish that with the cola commercial post?
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Um, uh, I dunno. It's possible that the clock was incapable of running at 50 Hz and locked in on twice the frequency of the Au mains, thus running at 100 Hz instead. That would make it gain about 40 sec/min.
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