Aristocrat", a tomato with a motif similar to Mr. Heinz Company released a clock with the figure of "Mr. Many companies have used talking clocks as a novelty item to promote their brand. In addition, one manufacturer purportedly produced a clock that would announce the time upon detecting a user's whistling signal. Manufacturers of such clocks include Sharp, Panasonic, RadioShack, and Reizen. There are over 150 tabletop clocks and 50 types of watches that talk. Talking clocks have found a natural home as an assistive technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. Talking clocks can also be used with children whose learning disabilities may be partially offset by the reinforcement provided by hearing the time as well as seeing it. One of the latest ones, the "Talking Clever Clock", includes a quiz button which asks questions such as "What time is it?", "What time will it be in an hour?", and "How much time has passed between 1:00 and 2:30?" Other educational talking clocks come in a kit designed to be assembled by children. Several other clocks of this type followed, including one featuring Thomas the Tank Engine. The first talking clock to be used for this purpose was the Mattel "Mattel-a-Time Talking Clock" of 1968. Uses and purposes Teaching timetelling Īfter the telephone time service, the next practical application of the talking clock was in the teaching of timetelling to children. As a futuristic design object even its LCD was hidden at the bottom, requiring the user to push the clock's top to hear it talk.Ĭurrent talking clocks often include many more features than just giving the time in these, the ability to speak the time is part of a wide range of voice capabilities, such as reading the weather and other information to the user. released their famous pyramid-shaped talking clock, the Pyramid Talk. The tiny controls to turn off alarm or set functions are hard to reach under a small bottom lid. It also had stopwatch and countdown timer modes. The alarm spoke the time and also had a melody " Boccherini's Minuet" after 5 minutes the alarm repeated with the words "Please hurry!". Its silver transistor-radio-like case contained complex LSI circuitry with 3 SMD ICs (likely clock CPU, speech CPU and sound IC), producing a Speak&Spell-like synthetic voice. In 1979 Sharp released the world's first quartz-based talking clock, the Talking Time CT-660E (German version CT-660G). In 1968, the first truly portable talking clock, the Mattel-a-Time Talking Clock, was released. This clock used a record, needle, and tone arm to produce its sound. In 1954, Ted Duncan, Inc., released the Hickory Dickory Clock, a crank toy intended for children. This type of talking time service is still around, and more than a million calls per year are received for the NIST's Telephone Time-of-Day Service. London began a similar service three years later. On its first day, February 14, 1933, more than 140,000 calls were received. In 1933, the first practical use of talking clocks was seen when Ernest Esclangon created a talking telephone time service in Paris, France. However, these belts were often broken by the hand-tightening required, and all attempts to reproduce the celluloid ribbon have so far failed. It is on display at the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania.Īlthough there have been rumors that other talking clocks may have been produced afterward, it is not until around 1910 that another talking clock was introduced, when Bernhard Hiller created a clock that used a belt with a recording on it to announce the time. In 1992, the Guinness Book of World Records recognized this as the oldest known sound recording that was playable (though that status now rests with a phonautogram of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, recorded in 1857). Lambert used lead in place of Edison's soft tinfoil. Around 1878, Frank Lambert invented a machine that used a voice recorded on a lead cylinder to call out the hours. Soon after Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph, the earliest attempts to make a clock that incorporated a voice were made. It may present the time solely as sounds, such as a phone-based time service (see " Speaking clock") or a clock for the visually impaired, or may have a sound feature in addition to an analog or digital face.Īlthough they would not be considered to be speaking, clocks have incorporated noisemakers such as clangs, chimes, gongs, melodies, and the sounds of cuckoos or roosters from almost the beginning of the mechanical clock. 1971 Panasonic Tele-Talk FM-AM Talking Clock RadioĪ talking clock (also called a speaking clock and an auditory clock) is a timekeeping device that presents the time as sounds.
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