Remember When You Could Call the Time?

Here in the LA Area the phone number for "The Time " was UL3-1212.

"At the tone the time will be two twenty nine and ten seconds....beep." 

 "It was always there," said Orlo Brown, 70, who for many years kept Pacific Bell's (and subsequently SBC's) time machines running in a downtown Los Angeles office building.

"Everybody knew the number."

Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s.

He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like

audio tracks on the exterior.

Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly.

"The people who worked on it took it very seriously," Frenkiel, 64, recalled.

 "They took a lot of pride in it."

In a twist of historical irony, Frenkiel went on to play a leading role in development of the technology that makes cellphones possible -- the very device that's now instrumental in killing 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.

LA Times Talks About the End Of Time.