**Remember when the exact time was given by the talking clock?** Museum of Communication Bern, PRO_97615

The pursuit of precision in timekeeping

The Swiss Post was long responsible for bringing the exact time into households in Switzerland, whether by phone or by radio. Sometimes it also offered a morning wake-up call.

Juri Jaquemet

Dr. phil., Curator of the Information and Communication Technology Collection, Museum of Communication, Berne

Time systems differed among the regions until well into the 19th century, and were guided by the sunrise and sunset, and the solar noon. Sundials were used to set the time of mechanical clocks. In rural areas in particular, day-to-day life was structured around the peal of bells. Time and space were adapted to the cosmic rhythms – in summer, the hours seemed to stretch out as the sun stayed in the sky much longer. This basically meant that the Church was the nation’s timekeeper.

As mechanical clocks became more precise, a quantitative notion of time arose, challenging people’s intuitive ‘sense’ of time’s passing. However, the introduction of measured time was a slow process and different time systems long co-existed. The Church and the clergy saw the relentless pursuit of precision timekeeping as competition, which threatened to erode their control over people’s daily rhythms as the day was no longer punctuated by religious rituals. The decades after the French Revolution saw the Church repeatedly attempt to hold back progress and retain its control over people’s time – but by the mid-19th century this was clearly a losing battle.

**The Church was long the ‘nation’s timekeeper’.** Museum of Communication Bern

**The advent of mechanical clocks in the 19th century ended the Church’s monopoly on timekeeping.** Swiss National Museum

Railways and telegraphs

It was almost impossible for the two large-scale systems of telegraphy and railways to operate with differing local time systems. To prevent chaos and confusion across Switzerland, the Federal Council decided in 1853 that Bern local time would be the standard for postal and telegraph traffic. The operation of the railways was also aligned to Bern time. It was therefore telegraphy that drove the adoption of a standardised timekeeping system in Switzerland, with the state-run post and telegraphy administration (later the PTT) taking control of standard time in the country.

The international community was experiencing similar problems and everyone needed to be on the same page for the increasingly globalised world to run like clockwork. The International Meridian Conference held in Washington D.C. in 1884 fixed the prime meridian in Greenwich, paving the way for the global introduction of standard time zones. The Federal Council subsequently introduced Central European Time in 1894 and the whole of Switzerland was aligned under a standardised system of timekeeping.

Neuchâtel as Switzerland’s timekeeper

The first step was to determine the exact time and that involved looking at the skies. Using a telescope, the meridian passages of certain stars could be observed. From 1860, the main task of the observatory in Neuchâtel was to determine the exact time using high-precision pendulum clocks that were guided by the movement of celestial bodies and the Earth’s rotation. The cantonal observatory in Neuchâtel was set up to respond to the needs of the watchmaking industry in the Jura Arc, and boosted the region’s profile.

The time signal was transmitted via telegraph line at lunchtime as demand for telegram traffic was low then. The watchmaking schools and clock factories paid a modest sum to obtain the exact time from Neuchâtel. Meanwhile, the PTT used the time signal for free and charged Neuchâtel Observatory a few hundred Swiss francs a year to use the lines – even though it was itself a beneficiary of the precise time from Neuchâtel.

**The observatory in Neuchâtel on a (damaged) glass photo plate. Pictured in 1935.** Memobase / swisstopo image collection

Master clocks in post offices, telegraph offices and stations were then set according to the electric time signal from Neuchâtel, which was transmitted via telegraph line in real time. Precise master clocks were the heart of local clock systems. While the accuracy of the Neuchâtel Observatory was already in the range of hundredths of a second, the precision of the master clocks throughout Switzerland would likely have achieved a precision of several seconds. Larger electric clock systems automatically aligned with the electric signal from the telegraph using complex mechanisms to adjust and synchronise.

**Station concourse in La Chaux-de-Fonds with large clock, circa 1900.** Swiss National Museum

After the First World War, pocket watches, wrist watches and alarm clocks became ubiquitous items. But their mechanical clock mechanisms were not yet very precise and had to be manually adjusted every now and again. And so, in 1935, the PTT started offering a public service so that people could always find out the exact time. By dialling 16 (later 161), people could consult the ‘talking clock’ – information about the exact time that flowed through the copper telephone lines of the PTT. The announcement of the time always started with the words “At the next beep the time will be...”.

00.00

The talking clock. Recording from the 1950s. Swiss National Sound Archive

The talking clock invention, originally launched in Paris’s phone network in 1933, was based on the sound film principle, where photo cells read off the stored sound recordings of hours, minutes and seconds. Between 1935 and 1956 three clocks manufactured by Brillié were in use. The first talking clock in Switzerland was in Geneva and spoke French. A German-speaking one was added in Bern in 1935. But the people of Ticino had to wait until 1942 for an Italian-speaking version. And it wasn’t until 1987 that the talking clock added Switzerland’s fourth national language, Romansh. The talking clock was popular for a long time. According to the NZZ newspaper, it received over 22 million calls in 1992! And the switch to winter and summer time in 1981 must have caused quite a surge in demand.

Report on the BBC Greenwich time signal. YouTube / HistoryPod

The PTT offered a special service from the late 1920s. By dialling 11 (later 111), people could be woken from their slumbers by a call from the state-owned enterprise. In 1941 this service cost 20 centimes per wake-up call, or a monthly subscription for two Swiss francs. In 1965, the wake-up service got its own dedicated number and was increasingly automated. If the call went unanswered, there would be two more wake-up attempts. So, the PTT ran a sort of snooze system long before the concept even existed.

**You could pay for a personal wake-up call by a PTT switchboard operator until well into the 1960s.** Museum of Communication Bern, PRO_02061. © Ernst Albrecht Heiniger / Swiss Foundation for Photography

By far the most popular public time-telling service are the time signals broadcast via radio stations. In Switzerland, the age of radio dates back to 1910 with the reception of time signals transmitted from the Eiffel Tower by the Paris Observatory. The first licence for a time signal receiver radio was granted to Paul-Louis Mercanton, professor of physics and electricity at the University of Lausanne. The second went to the watchmaking school in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The concentration on the Eiffel Tower meant that for a time Neuchâtel became almost irrelevant.

After the outbreak of the First World War, the Swiss telegraph administration seized all existing radio receivers. To replace the time signals, it introduced a telephone service in 1916 that was also based on the time signal from the Eiffel Tower. Between 10:56 and 11:00, a series of signals were transmitted over the phone.

In the 1920s, however, precision timekeeping from Neuchâtel regained its place on the airwaves. A look at the newspaper radio listings from that time shows, for example, that ‘time signals from the Neuchâtel Observatory’ were a permanent feature on Radio Bern’s broadcasting schedule from 1926. In the 1930s, the three national broadcasters in Beromünster, Sottens and Monte Ceneri took over this tradition, transmitting the exact time as a pulsed audio signal every day at 12:30 and 16:00.

**The Beromünster national broadcaster began operating in 1931.** Museum of Communication Bern

The observatory in Neuchâtel was always at the cutting edge of technology and by the late 1940s, quartz clocks had replaced the high-end pendulum regulators previously used. An atomic clock developed in Neuchâtel was exhibited at the World Fair in Brussels in 1958, and from then on was used for precision timekeeping. Between 1958 and 2011, the time signal transmitter in Prangins broadcast the exact time over long wave.

Since 1982, the Federal Institute of Metrology has been responsible for precise time measurement in Switzerland. Meanwhile, the observatory in Neuchâtel shut down its services in 2007. When the state-run enterprise PTT was dissolved, its successors the Swiss Post and Swisscom lost control of precision timekeeping. The last radio time signal broadcast in Switzerland was on 14 December 2012 at 12:30. This is because the new DAB+ digital radio technology makes real-time transmission impossible.

This blog post was originally published on the blog of the Museum of Communication Bern.

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