Today we’re going to have a look at some very early talking clocks, starting with this
one by Mattel.
But first I wanted to mention there were a number of talking clocks that came out in
the 1970s, such as these.
But these clocks only played pre-recorded sounds of the characters, they didn’t actually
speak the time.
You still had to look at clock face to see what time it was.
So anyway, back to the Mattel product here.
It’s actually called the Mattel-a-time talking clock.
Now, I think somebody decided to put this champion spark plug sticker on here, as I’m
pretty sure that didn’t come from Mattel.
But I did manage to find a picture online of what the box is supposed to look like.
That little girl there is probably still alive today, although she’d have to be probably
60 years old at this point.
And she’d probably be mad that her face was covered by a spark plug sticker.
Oh well.
And the back of the box here is pretty well ruined.
It has a letter to parents on the back as their sales pitch for this product.
OK, let’s open the box and have a look.
Notice on the back, if I can get the camera to see it, it was manufactured in 1968.
So this was a year before the first moon landing.
And so the idea here is that you can rotate the minute hand, which will also slowly move
the hour hand.
Once you have the time set where you want, you can just twist this little dial.
And… the time is 4:30.
There you go.
Let’s try another one.
The time is 6:45.
So, the Mattel-a-time, while advertised as a talking clock, isn’t really a clock at
all because it doesn’t actually keep the time.
Now, it’s not a far stretch to say that they had the technology to make it keep the
time, all they’d need to do is add some extra gears and mechanisms in there, but that
wasn’t the intended target for this product.
Nevertheless, let’s take it apart and see how it works inside.
As you can see it has a plastic record, sort of similar to what you’d find in a see-and-say.
Although one major difference is that this product has two tone arms.
One here, and another one over here.
Now, the way this works is that one one the tone arms plays the intro and the hour.
The other one plays the minute track.
That way you can have different combinations of the two.
In fact, you can see that when I rotate the dial, the gray tone arm relocates over and
over again to 12 different tracks, while the white tone arm moves very slowly.
So, obviously the gray tone arm plays the minutes, and the white one plays the hours.
And if you take a look at the record up close, and if I move the tone arm out of the way,
you’ll find two sections like this where there are entry point grooves.
But notice there are only 12 of them.
It doesn’t seem like that would be enough.
Well, I think the way this works is there are 12 tracks, which correlate to the 12 hours
on the clock.
And the minutes are recorded in 5 minute intervals, like this.
So, that’s the most accuracy you get.
For example, you’ll never hear this clock say that the time is 5 23 or something like
that.
It’s always going to round to the nearest 5.
And so I think these are on the same track, but the different tone arms play different
parts of that track.
Or possibly, there are parallel tracks like this, where you have one track in a regular
spiral, but then another track is in between.
I’m not quite sure.
But you get the idea.
There are also 2 speakers on this thing, that rest up against the two tone arms to amplify
the sound.
In fact, when you listen to the recording, you can actually hear the hours being spoken
over here on the left, and the minutes over here on the right.
Anyway, so that’s talking clock technology from the 1960s.
Moving to the 1970s, Techmoan recently did a video about a talking clock from that era
made by Panasonic.
And it used a magnetic disk.
So, in a way, it’s just the magnetic version of the Mattel talking clock.
But I wanted to find some of the earliest digital talking clocks.
So, I have this talking clock made by Spartus Electronics.
This was donated to me by Donghoon from South Korea.
He actually found a box with several of these clocks in there, which are essentially new
old-stock.
Never opened.
And, we’re not actually sure what time period this is from.
It doesn’t say anywhere on the packaging.
But I’m thinking this is a late 1970s design.
But, the only way we’ll find out is to open the box.
Now, the clear plastic cover here is very yellow looking.
And I suspect this is just from age.
It was probably completely clear at one point.
Anyway, I’m going to cut the tape here.
This is actually pretty exciting, opening a brand new product from probably 40 years
ago.
I don’t even know if it will still work, or anything.
So, after removing this yellow cover, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t meant to be that color,
especially when you look at the colors they have chosen for the box itself.
In fact, it actually looks beautiful.
I could imagine this sitting on a store shelf somewhere.
Anyway, let’s take the cardboard off.
And now we can remove the clock.
And here’s the users manual.
The first thing I did was look through to see if there was a date anywhere in the manual,
but I couldn’t find one.
So, I guess what we need to do now is take the plastic off here.
And then remove this screen decal.
Oh yeah.
And now I’ll just plug it in and hope it doesn’t explode.
And we’re in luck!
I just sprang to life without any complaints.
But does it talk?
The time is 12 AM.
Yes.
Yes, it does!
OK, well, I guess I should actually set the time to the correct time.
The controls are pretty intuitive.
I didn’t even need to read the manual.
The time is 6:49 PM.
Awesome.
So I wanted to hear the alarm.
There are actually two alarms you can set, a his and a hers.
I’ll go ahead and set one of them so we can hear how it sounds.
The alarm is set at 6:51 PM.
The time is 6:51 PM.
Excellent.
Well, let’s take it apart.
By the way you can see there is a battery compartment on the bottom.
But I think this is only for the purpose of backup power in case of a blackout.
In fact, many clocks of that era wouldn’t even operate on the battery, but it would
at least keep the time internally.
And by the way, I still haven’t found any dates on this thing.
Anyway, as I dig further and further into this thing, it’s somewhat refreshing to
see how it was manufactured.
I don’t see any of the ridiculous cost-cutting measures on this.
This was a product that would have likely worked for decades, and is even somewhat repairable
for many things that might go wrong with it.
Now, what is particularly interesting to me is that it has discrete integrated circuits
here.
Not just an epoxy blob somewhere.
In fact, looking at these chips here, this one right here is one I recognize.
This is the speech synthesizer chip.
And it’s the same one used in the original Speak and Spell from 1979.
In fact, this chip was designed in the mid 1970s.
All three of these chips are made by Texas Instruments, and I suspect the other two chips
are a microcontroller, and a ROM chip.
But I’m not sure which one is which.
But they do have date codes on them.
And to my surprise one of them is made in 1984 and the other in 1985.
OK, so maybe this clock isn’t quite as old as I thought.
But just because it has chips in it from 1985, doesn’t necessarily mean that it wasn’t
designed and original sold in like 1979 or 1980.
After all, the life cycle of products back in that time was much longer than it is today.
I mean, even the Commodore 64 was on the market for like 12 years or something like that.
So this could have very well been on the market for several years and this might have been
one of the last ones that was produced.
So now I want to take a look at an iconic clock from 1984.
This is the Seiko pyramid talking clock.
I’m fortunate enough to have the original box on this one too.
Here’s the manual, in a number of different languages.
And here it is.
I have to admit this is one of the coolest looking alarm clocks I’ve ever seen.
As you can see there is no visible screen when the clock is sitting up right.
You have to turn it upside down to see the screen.
Anyway, let’s open the battery compartment up and put some batteries in this thing.
It takes two triple A batteries.
Now I’ll go ahead and set the time.
And this thing also keeps track of the date, and the day of the week, which you can set
with this little bar.
But I’ll tell you right now, it does not speak the date or day of week, only the time.
OK, let’s try it out.
4:58 PM
The voice is not terribly clear.
It’s very low fidelity and top it off it has a Japanese accent.
Oddly enough, it has a stop watch, which you can only use from the bottom side of the clock.
If you push the top button, it won’t speak anything, it just stops the counter.
OK, well, let’s at least hear what the alarm sounds like.
So I’ve set the alarm to 5:01, now we just wait.
And I’m afraid that’s it.
Pretty underwhelming, if you ask me.
4:58 PM
And so that’s the Seiko Pyramid clock.
But, we should take this one apart too.
Unfortunately, I do have to cut this little sticker.
And here we go.
It’s surprisingly bare inside.
And you’re about too see why I’m certain that the Spartus clock I showed earlier was
from a much earlier time period.
This clock here was made in 1984, and as you can see there’s not much here other than
an LCD screen, and a small epoxy blob hidden right near the screen.
Anyway, let’s take this plate out.
Actually, it turns out there are two plates.
And, yeah, these are kind of heavy.
I think these serve only one purpose, which is to add weight to the clock.
Otherwise, there is nothing in the top other than this speaker and a switch.
And clearly, you can see the sound does actually come out of these little vents at the top.
And now I want to show you another clock, which has a similar design philosophy.
The Radio Shack VoxClock 2.
And while not a pyramid, I say it is similar because it has no screen on the top, just
a button and a speaker.
And flip it over and you get the screen and battery compartment on the bottom.
The VoxClock 2 can be seen here in the radio shack catalog for 1986, along with the VoxWatch,
which we’ll look at later.
Radio Shack had another talking clock in 1985, which is this one with the screen on the front.
And you can see it is New for 85.
But it doesn’t seem to appear in the 86 catalog.
And believe it or not, I owned both the voxclock and voxwatch here back in 1986, when I was
11 years old.
And this voxclock here is my original that I’ve had in my possession all of that time.
And as a total side tangent, Radio Shack also made a weather radio that has a very similar
appearance to the voxclock.
Of course, this was designed to listen to the NOAH weather stations.
A topic for another time, perhaps.
Anyway, let’s put some batteries in here.
Unlike the Seiko, this one uses dobule-A batteries.
And now I’ll set the time.
And let’s try it out.
It’s 5:13 PM
This sounds a lot better than the Seiko clock.
Let’s try the alarm.
Alarm on, it’s 5:14 PM.
Alarm, it’s 5:14 PM.
Well, there we go.
I’m about to take this apart, but I wanted you to see something interesting.
Even after you remove the batteries, the capacitors inside will keep the time going for about
a minute.
Anyway, here we go.
So we get 3 epoxy blobs here on this one.
One of them is probably a dedicated ROM, which explains why it has higher fidelity than the
seiko clock.
And the speaker is larger and better quality overall than the Seiko clock.
So, while it may not look at cool as the Seiko, it is certainly a better product in just about
every way.
And I’ve saved the best until last.
This is not my original Voxwatch.
I managed to find this one on eBay.
This also came out in 1986, and again I had one of these at age 11.
In fact, you can see it here on my wrist in this video of me testing out a Kodak disk
camera.
Unfortunately, this box is in terrible shape.
And the watch is a bit scratch up, but that’s to be expected if it got worn regularly.
I did get the manual here as well.
But there’s not much in here that isn’t obvious.
So the first thing I need to do is open the battery compartment.
And hope that the batteries are either removed, or at least not leaking.
And here we are.
I think I’m in luck.
I don’t see any leakage.
So I ordered on Amazon, a pack of 10 for around 17 dollars.
I thought that sounded about right.
But when I got the package in I realized I had actually ordered 10 packs of 6 for a total
of 60 batteries.
I have no idea what I’m going to do with all of these.
Oh neat, they rotate like a little carousel.
Anyway, so I’m putting in these batteries, and hoping it is going to work!
Let’s try it out!
It’s 12 AM.
OK, it works.
And after setting the time, let’s try it again.
It’s 6:42 PM.
I always liked the little sound it made when turning on or off the hourly chime.
It was like having a little sound effects generator on my wrist!
It also has a stop watch.
And unlike the Seiko clock, this one will announce the time elapsed.
And now I’m going to set the alarm for a minute ahead of time.
I want you to hear the little tune it plays.
Attention please, it’s now 6:45 PM
OK, and now I’ve saved the best until last.
I discovered when I was 11 that if you timed it just right, you could get it to say interesting
things.
Such as, when it was 6:00 you could make it say this.
So, one interesting piece of trivia is, the word “sick” had a very different meaning
back in the 1980s.
It wasn’t until the early 2000s until it became a popularized slang term for something
that is positive.
But anyway, the next one is pure gold.
If the time starts with a 5, you can make it say this.
And you can only imagine the laughs me and my friends got out of that when we were 11
years old.
I’d also like to mention again that back during the mid 1980s, Radio Shack really had
some cool products.
Stuff that just nobody else had and these two products here are a perfect example of
that.
You just couldn’t get anything like this anywhere else.
But anyway, that about wraps it up for this episode.
As always, thanks for watching.