REMARKABLE CLOCK

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23181, 29 October 1938, Page 9 (Supplement)

REMARKABLE CLOCK

Tim is One Of the Best Workers London's

By R. A. McINTOSH

THERE is in London a remarkable clock, which has no face and no hands and, indeed, doesn't look a bit like a clock at all, yet daily it tells the correct time to thousands of people. When Londoners forget to wind their watches or let their clocks run down, they simply go to the nearest telephone and -consult the > talking clock at a fee of one penny. So popular has Tim become' and so great the demand for his information that the Post Offico has decided to extend the telephone time service to other bifi cities in Britain. Tim, the London clock, is quite an fttfant yet,..for it wiH not have its seeped birthday . untjl/tliQ end of this yoir, bat there is an older brother ih Paris which, since 1933, speaking in faultless Fre:nch, has announced the time to millions of people. These remarkable talking clocks are nothing like gramophones. Thev are so reliable that the time they tell is never more than a tenth of a second in error, and such accuracy entails great skill and ingenuity in their construction. " The most beautiful voice the postal officials could discover, that of a girl telephone operator, was utilised for th«» recording, which was done on strips of paper in the same way as the movie actress' voice is recorded on celluloid film. The words were then distributed over 90 circular bands, all rotating together once in two seconds.

While one band repeats monotonously 360 times an hour "The time is three

hourS," another band is saying "ten minutes . . . ten minutes" once every ten seconds, while another band adds the linal words "thirty seconds," and to on. Ingenious control fits all these words together in the correct order, s6 that when a Londoner finds that his watch has stopped and dials T-l-M, what lie hears runs something like this: "The time is three hours ten minutes thirty seconds," and this announcement is followed by a musical pip exactly on the thirtieth second. In spite of the fact that it is making a similar announcement every ten seconds, one might stand by the talking clock and yet not hear a word of the 360 announcements made in that time, for the signals are transformed into sound only in the telephone receivers fit' the inquirers.' Tim is one of the host workers in the London Post Office, tor he told the correct time to no less than 20,000,000 people in the first 18 months of his life, earning £90.000, and he does not work a forty-hour week or anything like that. No matter what time of the day it is in London, Tim is always busy announcing the passing hours over as many as 200 distinct channels. Perhaps one day soon he will have even more work to do, for experiments have already been made in broadcasting the voice of his French brother, and it will not be long before every radio listener will be 1 able to tune in to Tim whenever the time is wanted.