The Talking Clock, the world’s first automated system of its kind, intended to give French legal time via a phone call, will be stopped on 1er July 2022, announced on Tuesday May 3, Orange.
Accessible from all over the national territory via 3699, this service “part of the French industrial heritage”, according to Orange, cost 1.50 euro plus the price of the call. Born in 1933, the talking clock, a world first, was invented by Ernest Esclangon, astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory. When it was put into service on February 14 of that year, its success was such that out of the hundred and forty thousand calls made, only twenty thousand were able to obtain an answer.
Atomic clocks
In 1991, Orange, then called France Télécoms, signed a partnership with the Paris Observatory. The year 1991 marks, in fact, the construction of a specific infrastructure to ensure the distribution of legal time in France with a time precision of the order of 10 milliseconds. Fourth generation of model, the current speaking clock has its origins in the “coordinated universal time” from the Paris Observatory, generated from a set of atomic clocks from the Sirte laboratory.
The discontinuation of this historic service is the consequence of the “planned end of life” equipment essential to its operation and above all “the steady and significant decline” number of calls to 3699. “The digitization of equipment, the multiplication of sources that can give the time, mobiles, computers, tablets, inevitably contribute to this erosion”Orange further explained in a press release.