"Au troisième coup..."

Communications The Parisian speaking clock is eighty years old:

"The talking clock at the Paris Observatory has been giving away time to phone callers for 80 years.

Invented to deal with an early example of information overload, it still gets about one million calls per year - charging 56 euro cents per call."

A couple of years ago it was revealed that one of the main customers of the speaking clock was local councils.