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“I was surprised that it still existed.” The “talking clock”, the world’s first automated spoken time system through a telephone call, has its time counted: on July 1 it will stop due to lack of users in the midst of the digital age.
France loses an icon almost a century after the launch of this service that gave the French legal time. The “talking clock” was born in 1933 thanks to the idea of Ernest Esclangon, astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory.
“When I was young, my mother kept asking me to use it. As if she had nothing else to do,” Claire Salpetrier, a 51-year-old English teacher from Magnanville, about 50 kilometers northwest of Paris, recalls with a laugh.
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Antonio Garcia, director of a clinic in nearby Meulan-en-Yvelines, expresses his surprise that it was still working. “It was something I knew when I was little, when there were no cell phones yet. It was very useful when we had to take the train or the plane”, he notes.
Orange, company heir to the historic telecommunications operator, ensured this almost centenary service, accessible throughout the territory through the number 3699. Since 1991, its time precision was 10 milliseconds.
“Like the analog camera”
“It was really something for children, for teenagers, what was needed when there was a power outage and you had to put everything back on time,” recalls Charlotte Vanpeen, who says she is “sad and nostalgic” when she learned of his disappearance.
“It’s like the analog camera against the digital one,” adds this 43-year-old press officer. “Today’s children have all the technology and don’t know what we have known. Good things are lost, ”she laments.
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The disappearance of this historic service is the consequence of the “scheduled end of life” of the essential materials for its operation and, above all, of the “regular and important” drop in the number of calls to 3699.
“In 1991, there were several million annual calls. It had a fairly significant utility then, but little by little we saw a drop “to” tens of thousands of calls in 2021, “explains Catherine Breton, Orange’s marketing director, to AFP.
For its last hours of existence, the price of the service is 1.57 dollars, plus the cost of the call.
Cell phones, computers, tablets, connected objects… With digitization and the increase in devices that can tell the time, “the need to use the ‘talking clock’ service has decreased over time”Breton assures.
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The latest version of this spoken timetable was based on the “coordinated universal time” of the Paris Observatory, generated from a set of atomic clocks in the SYRTE laboratory, housed in a secure and permanently air-conditioned room.
“It is part of the national heritage. It bothers me that it stops now that I’m taking care of it”, confesses the engineer Michel Abgrall, who tries to reassure the general public: the exact time can continue to be consulted… on the Observatory’s website.
Source: Elcomercio
I have worked as a journalist for over 10 years and have written for various news outlets. I currently work as an author at 24 News Recorder, mostly covering entertainment news. I have a keen interest in the industry and enjoy writing about the latest news and gossip. I am also a member of the National Association of Journalists.
