The historical talking clock leaves its place to the heurelegalefrancaise.fr website

Born in 1933, the Talking Clock, a world first, is an invention of Ernest Esclangon, astronomer and then director of the Paris Observatory. It was inaugurated within the institution and became the very first automated system to tell the time.

In 1965, the Paris Observatory joins the CNET (National Center for Telecommunications Studies, which became France Telecom Research and Development, then Orange), to give birth to the next generation models.

The fourth and last generation enters in service in 1991, date of the construction of a dedicated infrastructure to ensure the diffusion on all the territory of the legal time with an hourly precision of about 10 milliseconds.

Operated since then by Orange and hosted at the SYRTE laboratory of the Paris Observatory, the official talking clock service accessible via 36 99 will be suspended on July 1st 2022.
In the last few years, new applications have emerged that require synchronization qualities at least 10 million times better than those accessible via the talking clock.

How to stay in sync ?

Synchronization is a scientific, societal and industrial issue for the economy and sovereignty, and in particular for the fields of telecommunications and navigation systems.
If the talking clock disappears, other techniques of time transfers much more efficient remain :

• by NTP (Network Time Protocol) : a free service accessible on https://heurelegalefrancaise.fr/, recording about 1 million requests per hour ;

• by receiving a time signal transmitted in longwave (162 kHz) : ALS162 (free of charge, 200 000 clocks) ;
• by receiving satellite signals, and in particular GNSS systems such as the American GPS and the European systems GALILEO and EGNOS ;
• by using a service operated by a third party ;
• by calibration.