Looking south from the O'Connell bridge in Lestrygonians,
Bloom sees the four-story Ballast Office, which stood at the
corner of Aston Quay where Westmoreland Street begins running
south from the river. The building served as a reliable
timekeeper for the City and the Port of Dublin. Over the front
door, on the outside wall of the second story, perched a large clock known for
accuracy. On the northeast corner of the building's roof a
large copper ball descended every day at 1:00. Bloom sees that
the ball has fallen: "After one. Timeball on the ballastoffice
is down. Dunsink time." He is wrong about the Dunsink time,
but he corrects his mistake later in the chapter.
The copper ball, four feet in diameter, had a wooden pole
through its center, allowing it to be raised and lowered.
Gifford notes that it was rigged close to the river "so that
ships' chronometers could be checked" (accurate chronometers
were vital for calculating longitude at sea). The time ball
dropped each day at 1:00 PM Greenwich Mean Time, the
international standard. Ireland, however, was on Dunsink time,
25 minutes and 21 seconds behind Greenwich time. This time was
determined by the Dunsink Observatory north of Phoenix Park
and communicated directly to the Ballast Office by a five-mile
telegraph wire. The observatory time (wired also to Trinity
College, the General Post Office, and the Bank of Ireland) was
accurate to within one second per week.
From seeing that the ball has come down, Bloom judges that
the time is "After one." But on Irish time the ball fell just
before 12:35. If he were to walk down Westmoreland Street and
look at the clock on the building's wall, it might display
some time earlier than 1:00. Later in Lestrygonians,
returning to his earlier thoughts, he remembers that the ball
and the clock show different times: "Now that I come
to think of it, that ball falls at Greenwich time. It's the
clock is worked by an electric wire from Dunsink."
In Cyclops the Ballast Office puts in one more
brief appearance as the Flotilla Bloom floats majestically
down the Liffey toward open water: "Amid cheers that rent the
welkin, responded to by answering cheers from a big muster of
henchmen on the distant Cambrian and Caledonian hills, the
mastodontic pleasureship slowly moved away saluted by a final
floral tribute from the representatives of the fair sex who
were present in large numbers while, as it proceeded down the
river, escorted by a flotilla of barges, the flags of
the Ballast office and Custom House were dipped in
salute as were also those of the electrical
power station at the Pigeonhouse and the Poolbeg Light." The
Custom House sits across the river, and slightly downstream,
from the site of the Ballast Office.
The Ballast Office was owned by the Dublin Port and Docks
Board, the governing entity which had replaced the Ballast
Board in 1876. The Board maintained offices on the ground and
top floors, while the second and third floors held the offices
of Irish Shipping Limited. This building, with its time ball
on the roof for the benefit of shipping interests, was a vital
commercial hub in the days when oceangoing ships could sail up
the Liffey all the way to Carlisle (O'Connell) Bridge.
Today the docks do not reach so far upriver. The Port and
the City have become substantially separate entities, and the
Ballast Office was demolished in the 1970s to make room for a
new office block. However, the builders erected a "pastiche"
replica of the old building's facade to conceal the new one.
