Have you ever dialled 1194?

On the stroke of midnight on Monday, September 30, 2019, we lost George the Talking Clock.

On the stroke of that second, we lost access to Telstra’s timekeeping service – the dialling of 1194 to hear George the Talking Clock, give us the precise time.

As is often the way, it is only after we have lost something, that we learn the history of what we have lost.

The 1194 service was first available to us in 1953 and the perfectly modulated voice we heard give us the time down to the last second, first belonged to theatre critic Gordon Gow and more recently, to Richard Peach.

Australia was not the first country to offer this service – we were pipped by decades by the French, who gave their citizens the chance to use a phone to access the correct time in 1933.

In this country, while Telstra operated the billing and network for ‘George’, the service was provided by a company called Informatel, who reported that 1194 was still dialled two million times a year.

And so, at the third stroke at precisely 12pm on Monday, George pipped his last pip.