When was speaking clock invented

Significant others In , Brian Cobby became the first male voice to take over the clock. The Cold War During the Cold War the speaking clock network was designed to be used in case of a nuclear attack.

Modern developments The undisputed accuracy of the Speaking Clock led Accurist Watches to sponsor the franchise in , although this came to an end in Do people still use the clock today? Sign up for our newsletter Enter your email address below to get the latest news and exclusive content from The History Press delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign up. Share this page. Learn more about modern history Show more books. Trident Buy. Scandal at Dolphin Square Buy. Unsteady Crowns Buy. To a Dark Place Buy. Thorns in the Crown Buy. East London Buy. The modern world, it seems, is divided. My producer took me to see the first two Speaking Clock machines from and , which are preserved at the British Horological Institute in Nottinghamshire. We visited the old Holborn Telephone Exchange and searched the rather disappointing empty basement for the precise site of the first machine.

And along the way we learnt the most astonishing fact of all: that about 12 million calls are still made each year to the Speaking Clock, despite all those digital devices that nowadays inform us, at the press of a button, exactly what the time is. But to put it another way, we now always know what the time is… in London. It goes without saying that all our clocks are synchronised to Greenwich time. We forget that prior to the coming of the railways with those all-important timetables , there was no such thing as national time.

When the mail coach arrived people would gather around the coachman and get the political gossip and the official city time. Today a call costs The actual time is announced every 10 seconds. There have been four permanent voices used for the speaking clock. Temporary voices have been used on special occasions. The current voice belongs to Sara Mendes da Costa who became the fourth voice of the speaking clock in She won a competition BT ran in to find a new voice among the public.

The part-time voiceover artist beat 18, entrants. The second voice was Pat Simmons, from to Before , people used to ring the exchange operator, a real person, to settle a dispute over the time.

The Post Office had a long history of helping people set their clocks when many places still operated on local time, says Viscount Alan Midleton, curator and librarian at the British Horological Institute. This was before the railways made it essential for everywhere to be operating on the same time - set as Greenwich Mean Time. When the mail coach arrived a large number of people would gather around the coachman - who was like a walking Hello magazine - and get the political gossip and the official city time.

They were literally getting the time of the day and the gossip. The first Speaking Clock was accurate to within one tenth of a second and its modern equivalent is accurate to within five thousandths of a second.

For everyday things, such as catching a train, making a doctor's appointment or getting to school on time, that level of accuracy is unnecessary. But when even seconds are precious, it can be frustrating when your phone is displaying one time and your computer another. The Speaking Clock is still an emblem of accuracy to some people, which might explain why they're still prepared to pay for it, says Rory McEvoy, a curator of horology at the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

In , when the speaking clock was introduced, people were reliant on mechanical clocks, says McEvoy.