It is a telephone number that was dialed less and less over the decades. It will no longer be at all from the summer since, this Tuesday, Orange announced the final end of the speaking clock.
Accessible from all over the national territory via 3699, this service – the first automated system of its kind in the world at the time of its release – “was part of the French industrial heritage”, commented the incumbent telecommunications operator in the country.
VIDEO. The face of the speaking clock
The speaking clock was invented in 1933 by Ernest Esclangon, astronomer and director of the Paris Observatory. It was in 1991 – when Orange became a partner of the Paris Observatory – that the dedicated infrastructure was built to ensure the distribution of legal time in France, with a time precision of around 10 milliseconds. .
“Significant” drop in calls
The fourth generation model, the current speaking clock is based on the “coordinated universal time” of the Paris Observatory, generated from a set of atomic clocks from the SYRTE laboratory. The shutdown of this historic service is the consequence of the “scheduled end of life” of the equipment essential to its operation, and above all of “the regular and significant drop” in the number of calls to 3699, despite peaks at the time of changes. of hour.
“The digitization of equipment, the multiplication of sources that can give the time, mobiles, computers, tablets, inevitably participate in this erosion”, explained Orange in a press release.