The tale of timekeepers of Vizagapatam
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In 1840, Godey Venkata Jagga Rao, a zamindar and a trained astronomer, builds an observatory on Dolphin’s Nose Hill where time was recorded and announced using time-flags
As hard as it may seem to imagine for the current generation exposed to mobile phones and digital clocks from birth, until two centuries ago, only a few had the luxury of knowing the precise time of the day, and the majority had to wait for the hourly public announcement of time. However, the style of the public announcement is unique to the era, and those who were in their youth during the 70s and 80s must have heard about it from their elders.

“Nearly two centuries ago, the people of Visakhapatnam had a different way of knowing time. Old records of Visakhapatnam mention that the Army unit at the fort (at Old Town) used to fire a time-gun every day at 9 p.m. to inform the public and all the ships at the port of the correct local time. Later, the time-gun firing location was shifted from the fort to the Dolphin’s Nose Hill,” says Vijjeswarapu Edward Paul, a history chronicler and a member of the Indian National Trust for Art, Culture and Heritage (INTACH).