Remember When You Could Call the Time?

An article on The Atlantic this week takes a stroll down the memory lane. It talks about phone services that people could call for knowing the time. The service, according to the article, was quite popular in 1980s. But many of them don't exist now. For instance, Verizon discontinued the line -- as well as its telephone weather service -- in 2011. But what's fascinating is that some of these services still exist, and are getting more traction than many of us would've imagined. From the article:"We get 3 million calls per year!" said Demetrios Matsakis, the chief scientist for time services at the Naval Observatory. "And there's an interesting sociology to it. They don't call as much on the weekend, and the absolute minimum time they call is Christmas. On big holidays, people don't care about the time. But we get a big flood of calls when we switch to Daylight [saving] time and back." As it turns out, people have been telephoning the time for generations. In the beginning, a telephone-based time service must have seemed like a natural extension of telegraph-based timekeeping -- but it would have been radical in its own way, too, because it represented a key shift to an on-demand service. In the 19th century, big railroad companies had used the telegraph to transmit the time to major railway stations. By the early 20th century, people could simply pick up the telephone and ask a human operator for the time.

Comments

My community still has this...

[dave3138]

...it's run by the local bank. It gives a quick advertisement for the bank, then time and temperature. Many organizations in town use it as the "official" temperature in town - "sportsball practice is cancelled if the temp is below X degrees, call time and temp for the temperature". It's number is 320-587-4700...not sure how many concurrent calls it can handle :-)

Superannuated

[PopeRatzo]

I'm so old I remember when there was a number you could call that would tell you the date, and it would give it to you in Julian and Gregorian.

Re:Still call the 440Hz "A" note?

[Knuckles]

Can you still call for a proper "A" note in Austria?

Apparently yes: +43 1 21110 1507

A service by the Federal Office for Calibration and Measurement, they also offer time and a 1000 Hz tone. According to their official journal from 2010, page 5, "Verbreitung von Normalsignalen"
http://www.metrologie.at/index...

Well, at least you get an a' note at 440 Hz. However, Austrian (and German) orchestras use 443 Hz for a', and military and brass music uses 461 Hz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:You can still use WWV...

[willoughby]

And more. It's a time *and frequency* standard. After you completed your shortwave radio kit you'd tune WWV and "calibrate" your tuner & dial.

Time and Temperature. Time speaking.

[frovingslosh]

Years ago, in Pittsburgh, the number for the Time (and Temperature) was 391-9500 and reached the local power company, Duquesne Light. It still is, but you need to add the 412 area code now. It is still my "go to" number for testing a phone line when I don't want to bother a friend.

I had a small business and we added a private unlisted line. The installer wasn't even out the door yet when we got our first wrong number call on it. Wrong numbers continued throughout the afternoon and evening. People wouldn't say anything, they would just hang up. Finally I managed to get someone to talk to me, and they told me what number they were calling. It was 391-9500. Our new number was 931-9500. It hit me. We were getting an incredible number of wrong numbers where people transposed the first two digits trying to call for the time.

After I understood what the issue was the line became a lot of fun. If you answered the phone with "Hi. What time is it?" people usually knew what time it was and would tell you. If you answered with "Time and Temperature. Time speaking" you could often strike up a long conversation. I often told the story of how I screwed up and put my lunch on the tape reels of the time announcing machine and now my boss was making me answer all of the calls and give the time until the machine was fixed.

The power company would start each call with a little promo message such as "Electricity is your biggest bargain. Electric time is ..". I enjoyed answering in my best announcer voice "We can raise your rates whenever we want and there is nothing that you can do about it. Electric time is ...". I fondly remember one caller saying to someone else after that message "Boy, they are getting rude".