Audichron Company was a company founded in the 1930s by John Franklin in

Doraville Doraville is a city in DeKalb County, Georgia, United States northeast of Atlanta. As of the 2020 census, the city had a population of 10,623. History Doraville was incorporated by an act of the Georgia General Assembly, approved December 15, 1 ...

Georgia Georgia most commonly refers to: * Georgia (country), a country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia * Georgia (U.S. state), a state in the Southeast United States Georgia may also refer to: Places Historical states and entities * Related to the ...

, to produce the

Audichron {{unsourced, date=April 2021 Audichron was a talking clock, or a time announcer which was developed and produced by the Audichron Company Audichron Company was a company founded in the 1930s by John Franklin in Doraville, Georgia, to produce the A ...

, a

talking clock A talking clock (also called a speaking clock and an auditory clock) is a timekeeping device that presents the time as sounds. It may present the time solely as sounds, such as a phone-based time service (see "Speaking clock") or a clock for the vi ...

. By the 1970s, there were thousands of Audichron time-of-day announcers in use all over the world. Audichron had also developed a machine to announce the

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measurement, measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various Conversion of units of temperature, temp ...

. During the 1970s and 1980s, Audichron began to manufacture other kinds of equipment besides time and temperature machines. The Audichron sales force found sponsors, such as banks, for its time and temperature machines in a city. Once a sponsor had been obtained, Audichron would lease the machines to the local

phone company A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

. An Audichron field service engineer would then visit the telephone company and help install the Audichron equipment in the central office. The phone company would then hook up incoming trunks to the Audichron equipment and would bill the final customer (e.g., the bank) each month for the trunks and the Audichron equipment. Audichron received payments from the telephone company. Audichron hired speakers to come into its recording studio to make

recording A record, recording or records may refer to: An item or collection of data Computing * Record (computer science), a data structure ** Record, or row (database), a set of fields in a database related to one entity ** Boot sector or boot record, r ...

s. Each customer could choose between a man's voice and a woman's on the announcements. During the 1950s, Mary Moore did the female voice. She was replaced, about 1965, by

Jane Barbe Jane Barbe ( ; July 29, 1928 – July 18, 2003) was an American voice actress and singer. She was known as the "Time Lady" for the recordings she made for the Bell System and other phone companies. The ubiquity of her recordings eventually made he ...

, who specialized primarily in time and weather.

Pat Fleet Pat Trumble Fleet is an American voice actress. Widely recognized for the tens of thousands of recordings she has made for US telephone companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, the former Bell System companies, and others since 1981, she is still m ...

joined, in 1981, with customer-message recordings, coin-amount requests, and out-of-service recordings; she rarely did time and weather. John Doyle continues to be the only male voice. From the 1980s, the female voices were provided by Barbe and

Fleet Fleet may refer to: Vehicles *Fishing fleet *Naval fleet *Fleet vehicles, a pool of motor vehicles *Fleet Aircraft, the aircraft manufacturing company Places Canada * Fleet, Alberta, Canada, a hamlet England * The Fleet Lagoon, at Chesil Beach ...

; they were joined by

Joanne Daniels Joanne Daniels is an American voice actress. She is best known as the voice of telephone company time and temperature announcements for the Weatherchron company of Atlanta, Georgia (a competitor of Audichron), used in various parts of the United S ...

, who did number-change announcements and who was the "time lady" for most of the Western United States. The Audichron Company was acquired in 1989 by Electronic Tele-Communications, a manufacturer of telephone answering machines that was founded in 1949.Corporate History
Electronic Tele-Communications, Inc. Retrieved on 2008-08-29.

Patents

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References

{{manufacturing-company-stub Defunct manufacturing companies based in Georgia (U.S. state)