Hoptroff is a provider of distributed timing services, based in
London, England
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major s ...
.
The company was previously a watch manufacturer based in London, England, known for its atomic clock and high accuracy watches.
History
Hoptroff was founded in 2010 as Hoptroff London by Richard Hoptroff,
a
physicist
A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe.
Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate caus ...
with the original intention of supplying smart mechanical watch movements to the industry. In 2012, the company incorporated Bluetooth Low Energy technology
to its watches for the movement and sync with the mobile phones for configuration in order to display internet connected information.
In April 2013, the company unveiled its first atomic timepiece in London, which conceptualized it as a new variety of time regulation devices in clocks and watches, that could be placed alongside the balance spring, quartz crystal and the pendulum.
After the launch, the brand gained a reputation for the most accurate watch ever produced and was mentioned in several media outlets, such as
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
,
Engadget
''Engadget'' ( ) is a multilingual technology blog network with daily coverage of gadgets and consumer electronics. ''Engadget'' manages ten blogs four of which are written in English and six have international versions with independent editori ...
,
The Telegraph
''The Telegraph'', ''Daily Telegraph'', ''Sunday Telegraph'' and other variant names are popular names for newspapers. Newspapers with these titles include:
Australia
* ''The Telegraph'' (Adelaide), a newspaper in Adelaide, South Australia, publ ...
and others. In 2015, Hoptroff London launched a classic quartz watch range with a claim to being the first watchmaker to achieve better than one second per year accuracy in its quartz watches.
In 2015, the company repositioned itself as Hoptroff London Limited and started work building a proprietary network of timing hubs, incorporating Grand Master atomic clocks, in London, New York and Tokyo.
In 2020, Hoptroff successfully raised £982,700 through crowd funding, with the goal towards developing a global distributed timing network.
Technology
Hoptroff London watches are advertised by the company as "The most accurate timepieces in the world”. Its atomic timepieces use chip scale atomic clock technology, where a small vessel of Caesium 133 is exposed to 130 °C.
A laser is used to excite the atoms and a microwave resonator which causes the hyperfine transition frequency of the atoms. The resultant watch after this process has a higher accuracy of 1.5 seconds every thousand years.
However, the technology used its quartz timepieces is still unknown to the public.
As of 2015, the company moved away from watch production to focus on high accuracy time synchronization software for companies operating across distributed infrastructure.
See also
*
Bluetooth low energy
Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE, colloquially BLE, formerly marketed as Bluetooth Smart) is a wireless personal area network technology designed and marketed by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) aimed at novel applications in ...
*
Chip-scale atomic clock
A chip scale atomic clock (CSAC) is a compact, low-power atomic clock fabricated using techniques of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and incorporating a low-power semiconductor laser as the light source. The first CSAC physics package was d ...
References
{{reflist, 30em
External links
Official website
Watch manufacturing companies of the United Kingdom