The appeal of calling the time, for adults, was more practical. After an electrical outage, for instance, you might use the service to reset your clock. And though Verizon discontinued the line—along with a related telephone weather service—five years ago, the U.S. Naval Observatory still offers a time-by-phone service. (Call 202-762-1401 today, and you’ll hear a pleasant ticking sound followed by the announcement of the exact time, delivered in an old-timey-broadcasting voice.)

Not only does it still exist, but people still use it.

“We get 3 million calls per year!” said Demetrios Matsakis, the chief scientist for time services at the Naval Observatory. “And there’s an interesting sociology to it. They don’t call as much on the weekend, and the absolute minimum time they call is Christmas. On big holidays, people don’t care about the time. But we get a big flood of calls when we switch to Daylight [saving] time and back.”

As it turns out, people have been telephoning the time for generations. In the beginning, a telephone-based time service must have seemed like a natural extension of telegraph-based timekeeping—but it would have been radical in its own way, too, because it represented a key shift to an on-demand service. In the 19th century, big railroad companies had used the telegraph to transmit the time to major railway stations. By the early 20th century, people could simply pick up the telephone and ask a human operator for the time.

“A Western Union clock, corrected each day at noon by electric adjustment, has been installed in the office of the telephone company and in plain view of the operators,” an Indiana newspaper, The Hungtington Herald, reported in 1906.

During World War I, several cities discontinued such services to save time and labor, but many of them returned after the war. In New York, in the 1920s, you could ask for the time by dialing Meridian 1212—though in those days, there was a fee associated with the call. Automated systems emerged in the decades that followed, including one 1933 invention that featured a mechanical hand that picked up the phone receiver. By 1958, according to a New York Times article that year, the local service was getting about 90,000 calls a day. By the 1970s, a single market of callers generated hundreds of thousands of daily calls.

“For the last ten years,” the Times wrote, “Mrs. Mary Moore of Atlanta, Ga., has recorded: ‘At the tone, the time will be...’ Mrs. Moore, a Vassar graduate and a housewife with three children, announces the time for the Bell System in 240 communities.”

When I was calling the time, Jane Barbe was likely the announcer. In some markets, as part of her work as a recording artist for the Audichron Company, she also recorded sponsorship messages and information about the temperature.