Anyone under the age of 40 will probably shocked to know that there is, or was, a phone number you can call to get the time.  To be honest I’d totally forgotten about it, but when I was a kid everyone knew the number to call to get the universally accepted accurate time.  I seem to recall needing it after power outages, but now that we all have cell phones that give us the time I guess the numbers just aren’t needed by most of us anymore.

I was reminded of the call for time by this article in the LA Times about AT&T shutting down their time phone service in Southern California.  From the article I gleaned some interesting info about the phone company’s time machines:

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…

Phone companies have been providing the time to callers since the
1920s. In the early days, live operators read the time off clocks on
the wall.

In the 1930s, an Atlanta company called Audichron devised a system for
the time to be provided automatically. Audichron leased its technology
to phone companies nationwide, often with sponsorship from local
businesses.

Time ladies — and a few gentlemen — came and went over the years.
Then, in the 1950s, a woman named Mary Moore emerged as the nation’s
leading time-teller.

Her reading of hours, minutes and seconds was delivered in a
distinctive if somewhat prissy tone. Moore’s odd pronunciation of the
numbers 5 ("fiyev") and 9 ("niyun") influenced a generation of
operators, much as flying ace Chuck Yeager’s West Virginia drawl is
said to have been adopted by innumerable airline pilots.

By far the most prominent time lady was Jane Barbe, who succeeded Moore
at Audichron in the 1960s. A former big band singer, Barbe (pronounced
"Barbie") went on to become the voice of recorded telephone messages in the 1970s and ’80s in the United States and elsewhere.

It used to be that you could look in the front of your phone book to get the number to call for time and weather, but after digging out our phone book I don’t see it.  Anyone know if we have a number to call anymore here in Winston-Salem?