When was speaking clock started

When it was midday in London, it might be only It is lovely to think of simple villagers in remote regions scurrying off to tell their delighted friends and neighbours the pointless news that down in London it was a quarter-past three. But in the end, the need was serious. When portly Victorian railway passengers started to miss their connections at Crewe, it became necessary, mainly through telegraphy, to communicate Greenwich Mean Time to every part of the nation.

Everything about the Speaking Clock makes you go all shivery about time, I find. For one thing, at the British Horological Institute you can still listen to Ethel Jane Cain telling you the time as it was heard in But more profoundly, TIM was an automated system that was, itself, ahead of its time.

After being selected, Cain was given a script of things to say. She described the recording process in a Manchester Radio interview:. The way I recorded it was in jerks as it were.

To maintain the service, people calling were initially charged a single penny, a figure that has steadily risen over the years to 30p today, making the service incredibly profitable. Officially introduced on July 24, , the British speaking clock service received approximately 13 million calls during its first year of operation, a figure that becomes doubly impressive when you realise the service was only available in London for the first six years it existed.

In view of the possibility of certain members of the public becoming so enamoured of the golden voice that they are impelled to listen to it for an indefinite period, an automatic device disconnects the circuit at the end of ninety seconds. Brian Cobby, the third voice of the speaking clock from to , used to receive fan mail from people who used the service late at night just to hear his calm voice.

During the Cold War the speaking clock network was designed to be used in case of nuclear attack to broadcast messages from Strike Command at High Wycombe to regional police stations.

From there, automatic warning sirens could be started and alerts sent to Royal Observer Corps monitoring posts. The rationale for using an existing rather than a dedicated system was that it was effectively under test at all times. The signals to sirens were sent down the wires of individual unaware subscribers for the same reason. A customer would report any fault as soon as it occurred whereas a problem with a dedicated line would not be noticed until it was needed.

On the occasion of a leap second — such as at on December 31, — an extra second is always inserted in the pips at the end of the time message. BT Ethel Jane Cain was the first voice of the speaking clock in BT This is a manual that was created to let people know how to use the service.

Today a call to Timeline cost During the Cold War the speaking clock network was designed to be used in case of a nuclear attack. Had such an attack taken place then the clock would have broadcast messages from Strike Command at RAF High Wycombe to regional police stations.

In turn, this would have triggered automatic warning sirens and alerts sent to Royal Observer Corps monitoring posts. Using an existing, rather than dedicated, system mean that it was effectively under test all the time — customers would report any faults as soon as they occurred rather than risk having a problem with a dedicated line which would not be noticed until it was needed.

The undisputed accuracy of the Speaking Clock led Accurist Watches to sponsor the franchise in , although this came to an end in With the introduction of Subscriber Trunk Dialling, allowing long-distance calls to be dialled directly without operator assistance between the s and s, the Speaking Clock dial code changed to 80 and later By the s it was standardised to if dialling from a BT Phone line and the number still in use today.

At its height the speaking clock commanded around million calls per year. Celebrating 80 years of the Speaking Clock. Prior to this the nation was largely run on mechanical wind-up clocks that were prone to drift and increasing numbers of people were ringing telephone exchanges to ask the time.

Accurate to one tenth of a second The accuracy of the clock was calibrated and corrected by referencing to a time signal from the Royal Greenwich Observatory, broadcast by Rugby Radio Station. TIM Initially, the service was only available in the London directory area from the Holborn Exchange, but was rolled out nationwide in Significant others In , Brian Cobby became the first male voice to take over the clock.