This guide explains the speaking clock in plain language, with the exact figures and how to work them out yourself.
Before phones synchronized themselves, the surest household time came by telephone. France launched the world’s first speaking clock in February 1933 at the Paris Observatory, built under astronomer Ernest Esclangon after observatory staff grew tired of the public telephoning to ask the time; the automated voice, recorded on optical film like a movie soundtrack, answered thousands of calls on day one.
Britain followed in 1936 with the service that gave the format its famous phrasing: “At the third stroke, it will be…” followed by the hour, minute, and second, then three precise pips. The first voice belonged to London telephonist Ethel Cain, chosen from thousands in a “golden voice” competition. Generations knew the service as TIM — the letters dialed to reach it — and set the mantel clock, cooked the eggs, and checked the new wristwatch against it.
The pattern spread worldwide: Australia’s George in later decades, the United States’ observatory lines and local numbers (some cities reached theirs by dialing POPCORN), Japan’s 117 service, and dozens of national equivalents. At their peak the clocks drew astonishing traffic — hundreds of millions of calls a year in Britain alone — spiking every time clocks changed for daylight saving and every New Year’s Eve.
The voices themselves became minor institutions, updated every decade or two amid public auditions and newspaper coverage. The engineering evolved from optical film to rotating glass discs to digital speech, but the ritual stayed identical: dial, listen, set, hang up.
Smartphones ended the necessity but not, everywhere, the service. Britain’s speaking clock still answers at the dialing code 123, accurate to fractions of a second and still receiving millions of calls yearly — from landline holdouts, the visually impaired, people verifying a suspect phone clock, and the simply nostalgic. Other countries retired theirs quietly through the 2010s and 2020s as call volumes collapsed.
The speaking clock’s job — one authoritative time, delivered on demand — now happens silently a billion times a day through network synchronization, and visibly, for any city on Earth, in the live clocks at itsdately.com. The third stroke just no longer needs announcing.
The services also quietly carried national authority: their seconds came from observatory and standards-laboratory clocks, making the telephone line many citizens’ only direct connection to official time. Broadcasters piggybacked on the same authority — the BBC’s six pips, launched in 1924 from Greenwich, delivered the equivalent ritual by radio, and generations of households fell silent at the top of the hour to set the clock by the final, longer pip.
There was even show business in it: sponsors’ names rode the announcements for decades (“the time, sponsored by…”), voice changes made front pages, and children everywhere discovered the small delight of a telephone number that always, unfailingly, answered.
As heritage, the format proved portable: museums preserve the glass-disc machines, retired voices give interviews on anniversaries, and the phrase ‘at the third stroke’ entered the language as shorthand for officious precision — a technology remembered with the fondness usually reserved for radio itself.
Frequently asked questions
Related on itsdately: How Sundials Work (and How to Read One Correctly) · Before Mechanical Clocks: Water Clocks, Hourglasses, and Candle Time · The Oldest Working Clocks in the World
Further reading: Encyclopaedia Britannica — Clock.