Nostalgia: City time marker wasn't always so up-to-the-minute

The minute and 52 seconds which Edinburgh fell behind the rest of the world yesterday might have caused a good many businessmen to lose afternoon and evening trains," a city reporter wrote this week back in 1892.

The Edinburgh "time-gun" had been "anything but accurate" that month, prompting complaints that it was now only regular "in its irregularity".

"Gentlemen who anathematise their watches one day, and try to regulate them to go accurately, have recently been disgusted to find that the next day they had still to do a sum either in addition or subtraction to find out what was Greenwich time," the report continued.

Thankfully the columns of the Evening News these days do not have to mention such failings of the historic One o'Clock Gun, which sounds its call meticulously from the Castle every day except Sunday.

But its mention in the news more than 100 years ago demonstrates the long-standing and affectionate place it has held in the hearts of generations of residents.

The gun was first fired in 1861, the brainchild of Edinburgh banker John Hewat who, on a business trip to France many years before, had been impressed by the firing of a miniature time gun in the Palais Royal Gardens.