Speaking Clock History

Factoids

The BT Speaking Clock has been ticking 24 hours a day, seven days a week since 24 July 1936
The accuracy of the clock is within five thousandths of a second
Initially the accuracy of the clock was acute to one-tenth of a second
Each day the speaking clock makes 8,640 announcements
The world’s most famous clock, Big Ben, checks its time with the BT Speaking Clock
Accurist, the British watch manufacturer, was the sponsor of the BT Speaking Clock from March 1986 until August 2008
That word ‘stroke’ might be considered an odd choice. A GPO engineer called Edmonds wanted ‘stroke’ replaced, but his objection was overruled by Postmaster General Sir Kingsley Wood
At its height, the Speaking Clock commanded around 250,000,000 calls per year
In order to reach the service, subscribers used to dial the first three letters of the word ‘time’, because telephone dials included letters as well as numbers to aid automatic calls. This gave the clock it’s common name of TIM
The full and correct name for the Speaking Clock/Tim is Timeline
The current Speaking Clock is about the size of a small suitcase, compared with the first clock which was about 8ft long and took up almost the whole of a small room.
The Paris Speaking Clock was launched on the 14^th February 1933. A timely reminder to say I love you, perhaps? It was voiced at the time by Marcel Laporte, a popular broadcaster and actor at the time
The clock was designed and built at the Post Office Engineering Research Station in north London
The BT Speaking Clock has only had 4 permanent voices: Ethel Jane Cain, Pat Simmons, Brian Cobby and Sara Mendes da Costa
The first 3 voices were chosen from the BT telephone exchanges whereas a competition was launched to the nation to find the 4^th voice
Brian Cobby and Sara Mendes da Costa lived less than ½ a mile from each other in Brighton & Hove. No one on the 2006 judging panel knew this to be the case; it was quite random.
The most frequently dialled times are when the clocks change, New Year’s eve and at the end of a working day!
Every year BT joins forces with Comic/Sports Relief and chooses celebrity voices to take over the clock to raise money for charity
Alicia Roland (aged 12 at the time) was the first, and only, child to voice TIM and she ran for a week from 13 October 2003, in aid of Childline
Lenny Henry’s two week stint on the clock for Comic Relief was so successful, raising £200,000 for the charity, that he was asked to voice it for a second time
Rather aptly, back in 1985 when the current Speaking Clock equipment was introduced and updated from its previous format, it was in fact Colin Baker, the actor who played Doctor Who on BBC television, who made the change or “switch in time” from the old equipment to the new
None of the 4 permanent voices ever married – although, for one, it’s still possible I guess…!

Why was the Speaking Clock service introduced?

So what did people do before our beloved Speaking Clock was invented if they wanted a time check? They rang the operator and asked her the time by the exchange clock on the wall. But of course this was certainly not precise and the exchange couldn’t always answer the phone when the customer wanted them too. This led to a need for something more appropriate.

In Great Britain – back in 1935 – the nation was run largely on inaccurate wind up clocks, so the Speaking Clock service would certainly have given a much more accurate time check.

At the same time it’s said that the phone monopoly needed some cash, so it was decided that running a paid for Speaking Clock service would help solve that problem.

In Great Britain – back in 1935 – the nation was run largely on inaccurate wind up clocks, so the Speaking Clock service would certainly have given a much more accurate time check.

At the same time it’s said that the phone monopoly needed some cash, so it was decided that running a paid for Speaking Clock service would help solve that problem.

Other Speaking Clocks

We weren’t the first nation to introduce the Speaking Clock service.

The first genuine speaking clock machine was introduced in the USA in 1927, coming to Paris in 1933, The Hague in 1934 and Switzerland in 1935.

But automatic time service (of a Heath-Robinson kind) had been available to telephone users in San Francisco since the late 19th century; by listening to an observatory clock for at least a minute and decoding clicks and single and double buzzes against some detailed instructions you could set a pocket watch — but it helped if you already knew more or less what the time was.

How did they find the first voice of the Speaking Clock?

Sir Stephen Tallents – one of the world’s first multi-media entrepreneurs and the publicity director of the General Post Office – devised an in-house competition to find a woman’s voice for this new service which would include 79 phrases.

Stephen certainly wasn’t short of candidates. In the 1930s, telephone exchanges employed streams of young, single, well-spoken, lower middle-class girls working as operators and connecting calls manually.

Tallents announced the competition and a whopping 15,000 women entered. It was a very big thing at the time and the judges were poet laureate John Masefield, actress Dame Sybil Thorndike and chief BBC announcer Stuart Hibberd.

Final of Golden Voice Competition for the Speaking Clock

John Masefield said the winner would sound ‘like a nightingale singing at midnight without any trace of over-emphasis or personal advertisement’. But advertisement was what it was all about.

In the 1930s, a good looking young woman with a beautiful voice was certainly a way to make money and lots of it but their looks had to be put to one side initially. The contestants each sat behind a screen while they read their test piece from Milton so that, in the worlds of The Times, ‘their nicely waved hair and pretty faces, do not confuse the issue’ How lovely!

But of course when the finalists were named, the organisers wanted photos. And as ‘luck’ would have it, Ethel, who worked at the Victoria exchange, was blonde, tall, slim and with sparkling eyes.

Great Britain’s Speaking Clock service began in London on 24th July 1936

Amusingly, it was deemed fit to curb the amount of time callers could listen to Ethel’s voice for. The reason being it was thought that some callers were becoming rather too smitten with her dulcet tone and perfect diction. That coupled with the glorious notion of having the precise time given, was what prompted the GPO to have a disconnect at the end of three minutes.

In the written words of one GPO engineer: ‘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 three minutes.’

Occasionally callers complained that three minutes wasn’t long enough. Operators were told that those calls should be carefully supervised. How wonderful!

The photograph shows the Postmaster General with judges who include Major Tryon and Mr John Masefield, the Poet Laureate (Picture dated 21 June 1935).
Photo courtesy of www/britishtelephones.com

The technical stuff

On 24th July 1936 the Speaking Clock was inaugurated with a pair of clocks in the Holborn exchange. They had been developed by the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, north London.

The Speaking Clock was in fact a highly advanced piece of engineering. Ethel’s voice was recorded photographically on glass discs, on to which light was bounced and received by photocells, not unlike a modern CD.

The original speaking clock message was recorded and replayed rather like the optical sound track of a film and the equipment represented the state of the art of current technology in those days. This lasted until 1963, when it was replaced by more modern recording technology, using a magnetic drum. The company that manufactured the rotating magnetic drum part of the Speaking Clock was Roberts & Armstrong (Engineers) Ltd of North Wembley. They took on the license from the British Post Office to manufacture complete clocks for the telecommunications authorities of Denmark, Sweden and the Republic of Ireland, and a third (spare) clock for the British Post Office. This latter was installed in Bow Street, London. The European clocks were modified for the 24 hour system by lengthening the drum and adding extra heads. Roberts & Armstrong subcontracted the electronic aspects to the Synchronome Company of Westbury. The clocks were designed to run non-stop for 20 years.

This system gave way to the present digital system in 1984, which uses a built-in crystal oscillator and microprocessor logic control. The complete apparatus comprises solid-state microchips, occupies no more shelf space than a small suitcase and has no moving parts at all.

Rather aptly, back in 1985 when the current Speaking Clock equipment was introduced and updated from its previous format, it was in fact Colin Baker, the actor who played Doctor Who on BBC television, who made the change or “switch in time” from the old equipment to the new.

Corporate Usage

Several major organisations including British Rail and London Weekend Television have permanent feeds of the clock from BT into their private internal phone systems so employees can check the time without making an outside call. The timing of all ITV television programmes is synchronised to TIM as well, so when your local station goes over to ITN for the News at Ten, this is done “At the third stroke”. And perhaps the strangest—and certainly longest distance—call to the British speaking clock was from the factory in Hong Kong which made the handsets for the VideoPlus VCR programming system. The in-built clock was set to British time, courtesy of BT’s Timeline service.

Accuracy

The reliability of the BT Speaking Clock is beyond reproach. It is assured to be accurate to within five thousandths of a second.

Sponsorship

The undisputed accuracy of the BT Speaking Clock also led to the association of Accurist Watches, who from March 1986 until August 2008 sponsored the Timeline announcements. Due to the millions of calls made to the Speaking Clock every year, this may well have been the most frequently heard advertising message of all time.

Permanent voices

In 1963, Ethel Jane Cain’s voice was replaced by that of Miss Pat Simmons who was a supervisor in a London exchange – also chosen as a result of a national competition run within the telephone exchanges. Once again, the competition was run to select a clear a nontheatrical voice.

Pat reined until 1985 when a third competition was run and, breaking tradition, it was the wonderful Shakespearean tones of Brian Cobby from the Withdean exchange in Brighton who took over from Pat. Brian Cobby, also an actor, was selected from 12 finalists on 5^th December 1984. He has been quoted as saying ‘I was the only clock to have a pendulum’. This always brings a smile to my face.

In autumn 2006 a fourth competition was run through Children in Need, opened, for the first time, to the general public. 18,405 people entered via a competition phone line and on Friday 17th November 2006, the winner, Sara Mendes da Costa, was announced live to the nation on Children and Need on BBC1.

On the 2^nd April 2007, Brian’s voice changed over to Sara’s at 8 a.m precisely. Sara was invited on to Wake Up to Wogan with ‘The Man Himself’ to air the changeover live. Click here for the full story.

Why we still use the BT Speaking Clock

A close up of the clock face of Elizabeth Tower (aka Big Ben) at the Houses of Parliament.

The man who dials the Speaking Clock every day in order to correctly set Big Ben.
Image courtesy of the BBC and Mashable.com

I hear these sorts of questions asked often: ‘Do people still call it?’ ‘Does it still exist?’ ‘Why do people both when there are clocks everywhere, like computers and mobile phones?’ Clearly people do still call the BT Speaking Clock and I think there are a number of reasons.

Firstly, many of us have used the service all our lives, and continue to trust it as the most accurate time check possible. With accuracy to within 5000^th of a second, there is no question that when you dial TIM, you’ll get the right time.

It’s familiar, it’s trustworthy and it’s a British institution – one that many people enjoy being associated with. It’s part of our history.

There are of course digital clocks everywhere – on our phones and computers etc, but these time signals are fed to us via satellites. If, when, these satellites lose the signal – which does happen for sure –the accuracy disappears and the time we are given also goes off course and is estimated for the period of time the signal is lost. For this reason, you’ll find that the clocks on the different computers around an office can differ as the signal has been lost then reinstated again, changing the time slightly. To all intents and purposes they will be pretty accurate but seconds will drift and total accuracy cannot be guaranteed. To some this won’t matter a jot – after all, what’s a few seconds – however to others, the precise time will be of the utmost importance.

I remember as a child the many conversations we’d have amongst school friends about who had the right time on their watch. It could get quite heated! I can remember one friend saying her watch was definitely right because she timed it by her father’s watch and her father adjusted his watch, every day, to make sure it matched with the time shown on Big Ben – as he drove past it each morning. The key thing here is Big Ben is timed by the BT Speaking Clock! Big Ben’s time is regularly reset after a man picks up a landline and telephones the Speaking Clock, ensuring the chime is within one second of Greenwich Mean Time.

Perhaps time isn’t quite as important to us these days, at least not in the same way. After all, we do have access to a pretty accurate time on our phones and computers and it’s not so much the topic of conversation it used to be when most watches were wind up ones and prone to losing precious seconds and minutes very frequently, but it’s still something which is talked about often. We forever ask, ‘what’s the time?’ or check our watches or mention time in our conversations – usually when we don’t seem to find enough of it – so it’s clearly a topic which is, and no doubt will be, talked about for many, many years to come. Therefore, when it comes to it, I, for one, will always trust the BT Speaking Clock to give me the precise time whenever I need it.

Why do people refer to the BT Speaking Clock as TIM?

The service used to be obtained by dialling the numbers which corresponded to the letters T I M on a phone – 846. Hence the service was often referred to as TIM. However this code was only used in telephone systems in the cities of London, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester. Other areas initially dialled 952 but then when Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) codes were introduced, it was changed to 80 and later 8081. Then by the early 1990, it was all standardised to the more familiar 123.

Leap Seconds

On the occasion of a leap second, such as at 23:59:60 on December 31, 2005, there is a one second pause before the beeps, thus keeping the speaking clock in sync with Coordinated Universal Time.

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth’s rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth’s rate of rotation. Since the system of correction was implemented in 1972 – and at the time of writing – 26 such leap seconds have been inserted. The most recent two occurrences were June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC and June 30, 2015 at 23.59:60 UTC.

Additional facts from Wikipedia

During the Cold War, the British Telecom speaking clock network was designed to be used in case of nuclear attack to broadcast messages from Strike Command at RAF High Wycombe to HANDEL units at regional police stations. From there, automatic warning sirens could be started and alerts sent to civil defense volunteers equipped with manual warning devices. The rationale for using an existing rather than a dedicated system was that it was effectively under test at all times, rather than being activated (and possibly found to be faulty) only in the event of war. The signals to automatic 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.

A version of the speaking clock was also used on recordings of proceedings at the Houses of Parliament made by the BBC Parliament Unit, partly as a time reference and partly to prevent editing. On a stereo recording, one track was used for the sound and the other for an endless recording of the speaking clock — without the pips, as these were found to cause interference.

Memories from James Campbell (January 2001)

A direct Speaking Clock feed existed to the BBC. I remember in about 1983 visiting a BBC building on the Embankment just round the corner from Westminster tube station, it was no 1 (can’t remember the name of the road). It was a half derelict building covered in pigeon sh*t, but on the second floor was the BBC Parliamentary Recording Unit. It was linked via cables under the road to the Houses of Commons and Lords. This was a place that looked like a museum but was fully operational.

The thing that I found amusing was the fact that they recorded all the material in mono on one track of the tape recorder, and recorded TIM on the other track as a quick time reference. Because the pips were rather good at breaking through to the other speech track, this particular TIM, provided by BT, did not have any pips and was known by the BBC as “seedless TIM”.

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