Audichron Company

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Audichron Company was a company founded in the 1930s by John Franklin in Doraville, Georgia[1], to produce the Audichron, a talking clock. 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. 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. 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 (the bank) each month for the trunks and the Audichron equipment. Audichron received payments from the telephone company.

Audichron hired "talent" to come into their recording studio to make recordings. Customers had a choice of whether they wanted a male voice or a female voice on their announcements. During the 1950s, a lady named Mary Moore did the female voice. During the 1970s, both Jane Barbe and Pat Fleet did the female voices and John Doyle did the male voice. From the 1980s, the female voices were provided by Joanne Daniels and Fleet. [2]

The Audichron Company was acquired in 1989 by Electronic Tele-Communications, a manufacturer of telephone answering machines that was founded in 1949.[3]

[edit] External links

[edit] Patents

  • US patent 3974338, "Apparatus for automatic message reprogramming of a message announcement system", granted 1976-08-10, assigned to The Audichron Company 
  • US patent 4005491, "Dampened transducer support apparatus for message announcing system", granted 1977-01-25, assigned to The Audichron Company 
  • US patent 4389546, "Digital announcement system including remote loading and interrogation", granted 1983-06-21, assigned to The Audichron Company 
  • US patent 4446337, "Method and apparatus for revertive automatic intercept message delivery in a telephone system", granted 1984-05-01, assigned to The Audichron Company 
  • US patent 4791666, "Automatic intercept system interface for electromechanical telephone central office", granted 1988-12-13, assigned to The Audichron Company 

[edit] References

  1. ^ John Novack (2005-11-21). "Audichron information". VoIP electronic mailing list archive. Retrieved on 2007-08-29.
  2. ^ "Time of day calling it quits at AT&T", Los Angeles Times, August 29, 2007
  3. ^ Corporate History, Electronic Tele-Communications, Inc. Retrieved on 2008-08-29.
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