Bay Curious
Before smartphones kept us ever-tethered to the exact time, there was a service you could call to help set your clocks. (OllyKava/Getty Images)
Archival Recording: At the tone, Pacific Daylight Time Will Be…
Listener 1: Because we spent a lot of time calling popcorn, I still remember her voice.
Listener 2: If you’re inside the BART station, you could look up and you could see what time it was. But once you were outside the BART station, you were oblivious to what time it was. So they need just find a pay phone and you just dial popcorn. And that’s how you knew if your mom was late or when the next BART train was coming.
Olivia Allen-Price: It was a handy service for a while. But in 2007, POPCORN went dark. A Bay Curious listener named George wants to know why. Today, we’re … looking at the history and ultimate demise of POPCORN. This episode first ran on Bay Curious in 2021 and is one of our team’s all-time favorite episodes. Stay tuned. I’m Olivia Allen-Price. Reporter Christopher Beale takes us inside the wonderful world of POPCORN…
Peter Amstein: Telephone service began in this country in 1878.
Christopher Beale: That’s Peter Amstein.
Peter Amstein: I am the president of the board of directors of the telecommunications history group.
Christopher Beale: In the years following Alexander Graham Bell’s invention, phone service begins to spread across the country, and those earliest phones were connected by operators. If you wanted to make a call, you would pick up the handset and speak to a human who would manually connect you.
Archival sound: This is information. May I help you? Yes, I’d like the new number of Wilson’s meat market. 1191 Sycamore Street, please. One moment, please.
Peter Amstein: The phone company wanted to be friendly and helpful. And certainly, if the operators weren’t too busy and had time, they would answer all sorts of questions for people, including about what the weather was…
Christopher Beale: And the current time. In those days, unless you had a good wristwatch or clock, that you remembered to wind. You may not have had completely accurate time on you like we do today. That’s where the operator came in.
Peter Amstein: Starting in 1870 already, Western Union, who was the Telegraph company, offered a nationwide, highly accurate time service, where they would install a clock in your business that was controlled centrally by their master clock in New York City and represented super accurate it’s time for the day.
Christopher Beale: You might find this type of clock in a railroad station, and the phone company would have had one as well. So, while it wasn’t an official service, you could call the operator and say, “What time ya got?”
Peter Amstein: She would tell you.
Christopher Beale: And that was pretty much the norm until 1918 when our planet’s last great pandemic made its way through the population. The Spanish Flu killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. The country was at war with an invisible force and communication was an important weapon. Those early operators became — essential workers, you might say.
Peter Amstein: The phone company started putting notices, the newspapers, telling people the operators would no longer answer questions like what time it was, because they needed them to concentrate fully on connecting people’s phone calls.
Christopher Beale: By the time the Spanish Flu ran its course in the early 20s, some cities were experimenting with a semi-automated, live time-of-day service. This was a doozy. To get the time, you would dial a number and be added to a very brief queue. This machine would play a beep every 7.5 seconds, you’d hear the beep and be connected, along with all the other callers in the queue.
Peter Amstein: And then a human being, always a woman, would be sitting at a desk, looking at a clock and reading out the time live, and then waiting for the beep and then reading it out. Live.
Christopher Beale: If you called in during the brief window where she was reading each quarter minute — you’d be queued for the next reading…7 and a half seconds later. Can you imagine this being your job? At the tone, it will be 9:55 and 45 seconds. At the tone, it will be 9:56 and 00 seconds. I’m already bored. In addition to being boring — this just wasn’t a feasible long-term answer to the need for time. The world was changing rapidly and a completely automated solution was needed. The good news — the phone company already had some useful technology just laying around. Called a drum recorder — these machines were used to playback repetitive messages on the phone like:
Phone recording: If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.
Christopher Beale: I mean, we’re talking about early tape deck technology. But that tech-inspired a man named John Franklin.
Peter Amstein: Who was the proprietor of something called Tick Tock Ginger ale
Christopher Beale: To create his own ad-supported time and date phone service. The first of its kind.
Peter Amstein: he used one of the phone companies drum recorders and modified it so that it would always announce the current time.
Christopher Beale: John Franklin’s invention would help him found the Audichron company in the 1930s. The technology they created was installed in cities big and small across the country. Audichron would hire an actress to read the times and dates and even sponsors in some cases. And then that modified drum recorder technology would handle the playback. In each region, the time service would have its own dedicated line, or in the case of Northern California … 30,000 dedicated lines …more on that in a second. The announcer in Northern California’s recordings, lovingly referred to as the time lady from the 1960s to the very end it was Ms. Joanne Daniels.
Joanne Daniels: Good afternoon, at the tone Pacific Daylight Time will be 12:24 and 10 seconds.
Christopher Beale: I think this is so cool — as the time, lady Joanne had a sort of a general American accent, but in real life, she has a southern accent that she can turn on and off.
Joanne Daniels: Since we’re having a friendly conversation, I’m just being myself.
Christopher Beale: Joanne talked to Steve Rubenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle in August of 2007.
Steve Rubenstein: Ms. Daniels, we’re speaking because, uh, AT&T has announced here in Northern California that it is canceling the time service recording as of September 19th, which is more or less the end of an era. And, uh, Ms. Daniels, this a distressing day out here in California? Is it distressing for you in Atlanta to hear that?
Joanne Daniels: It certainly is distressing. I feel like I’m fading away.
Christopher Beale: There are likely two main reasons that POPCORN was abandoned. The first has to do with the way the number is dialed. You would start with your area code, 510 or 415, etc. Then dial 767 (this was the POP) in popcorn, and it worked all over Northern California.
Peter Amstein: Any four digits that you dialed after seven, six, seven would get you the time of day service.
Christopher Beale: And we’re not talking about just one phone number in each area code here. We’re talking tens of thousands of phone numbers directed at POPCORN.
Peter Amstein: That was a technical shortcut for them.
Christopher Beale: By eliminating that shortcut and POPCORN…
Peter Amstein: They were able to get 30,000 new phone numbers.
Christopher Beale: The other main reason popcorn, and similar services across the country began to go away — the prevalence of new technologies like our cell phones. Which always have the correct time — but are also always listening to us in a not-at-all-creepy sort of way.
Siri: Hey, I heard that.
Christopher Beale: In 2007, Steve Jobs announced the first ever iPhone…and just three months later — time caught up with POPCORN. And AT&T pulled the plug. Joanne Daniels told the Chronicle that she thinks that’s really sad.
Joanne Daniels: I think it’s filled a need for a lot of people that aren’t quite, as I would say, modern as the trend is going.
Christopher Beale: Are there still any time-of-day services in operation today?
Peter Amstein: Sure. Yes. For example, you can call the US Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, at 202-762-1401. And here the time of day recording, of course, you get East Coast time that way. You can also call the National Institute of Standards and Technologies. Time of day number in Boulder, Colorado. There are also still a fair number of advertisers sponsored local time-of-day numbers.
Christopher Beale: Including, by the way, 415-Pop-Corn in San Francisco…Where today, you’ll find an ad, the date and the time of day. Of course, these days, your smart home or smartphone’s digital assistant can give you the date, the time, the weather, and more.
Siri: But, we will never be able to replace …the POPCORN time lady. She was the best.
Joanne Daniels: I’m going to miss being with you. And I would like to thank everyone in San Francisco for listening to me for all these many years.
Christopher Beale: John Franklin’s Tick Tock Ginger Ale faded into obscurity, but Audichron is still around, making computerized automated phone services to this day under a different name. Apple did alright with their iPhone. And as of December 2020 — Joanne Daniels is retired and living in Atlanta, GA.
Joanne Daniels: The time in San Francisco is time for me to say goodbye.
Dial tone
(End of story)
Olivia Allen-Price: Reporter Christopher Beale
Olivia Allen-Price: We are sad to share that Joanne Daniels died in February 2023. She was 91. In her obituary, it’s said she always had a smile on her face and was a joyous influence to those around her.
That’s all for today, folks. If you enjoyed this story, maybe it brought back some warm, fuzzy memories..? Do us a solid and share it with a friend. We rely on word of mouth to grow, so everything you can do helps! Thanks!
Bay Curious is made in San Francisco at member-supported KQED.
This episode was produced by Katrina Schwartz, Christopher Beale, Suzie Racho, Katie McMurran and me, Olivia Allen-Price. Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Cesar Saldana, Maha Sanad, Bianca Taylor, Holly Kernan and the whole KQED Family.
We’re off next week for the holidays, but we’ll be back the first week in January. Thank you so much for listening and I wish you joy and peace in these finals weeks of 2023.
