The “Talking Clock”, the first automated system in the world of its kind, intended to give French legal time via a telephone call, will be stopped on July 1, 2022, announced Tuesday Orange, the incumbent telecommunications operator in the country.
Accessible from all over the national territory via 3699, this service “part of French industrial heritage”, according to Orange, cost 1.50 euros 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.
Orange has been a partner of the Paris Observatory since 1991, when a dedicated infrastructure was built to ensure the distribution of legal time in France with a time precision of around 10 milliseconds.
Fourth generation of model, the current “Talking 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.
“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.