About the clock
This is a recreation of the original Australian Postmaster General's talking clock, often colloquially known as 'George' but officially the Speaking Clock MK II designed by the British Post Office Engineering Department and manufactured by the Telephone Manufacturing Company Ltd, London.
It was shipped to Australia in 1954 and in November of that year the transition was made from human operators who up until that point had been announcing the time manually in 30 minute shifts. These machines continued to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until thier replacement by a digital equivalent with new recordings by ABC presenter Richard Peach on September 12, 1990. The Telstra time service was ended permanently just before midnight on October 1st, 2019.
Click here to visit 1194online
A site which recreates the 1990 electronic replacement.
These recordings were made from the prototype speaking clock machine, held by the London Science Museum. The original machine stores the audio on glass disks, in a seies of concentric tracks of varying brightness. Much like how audio is stored on cine film.
The Minutes disk is slightly off-centre, and at some points on the disk the sensor picks up some of the adjacent track. In most cases this bleed through is inaudible, but it is prominent on some recordings. Most notably on the nine.
From paulseward/asterisk-tim
A very special thankyou to github.com/paulseward whose recordings of the Gordon Gow disks installed in the prototype machine in the London Science Museum for their asterisk-tim formed the basis of this project and are of themselves an important historical record.
- A 5 minute film from 1955 about the installation of the new clock, hosted by the Australian National Film and Sound Achive
- The London Science Museum page about the exact machine these recordings were made from.
- Wikipedia page about the speaking clocks, link goes directly to Australian section.
- Inspired greatly by the ryanmonro/george repo, available as 1194online.com which recreates the 1990 electronic replacement with the voice of Richard Peach.