American clocks - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, April, 2000 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

The Philadelphia Antiques Show benefiting the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center, has a well-deserved reputation for the museum-quality loan exhibitions mounted in conjunction with the show, which is now in its thirty-ninth year. The loan exhibit this year celebrates the new millennium with a display of timepieces made in the United States between 1680 and 1860. Most represent a survey of clockmaking in the Delaware River valley but for comparative purposes, several clocks made in New England and the South are also on view.

Entitled It's About Time, the show is on view between April 8 and 12 at the Thirty-third Street Armory. The forty clocks in the exhibit were selected by the collectors Dr. Robert E. Booth Jr. and Katharine Booth, who jointly wrote the essay in the catalogue that accompanies the show.

Tall-case clocks were first made in Europe, whence they came with the early immigrants to Philadelphia. Examples in the exhibit include two clocks with a history of ownership in Philadelphia. One was made in London by Johann Fromanteel in the 1670s, and the other by William Martin of Bristol and brought to Philadelphia by William Penn in 1699. The earliest tall-case clocks made in Pennsylvania have pyramidal tops, which evolved along architectural lines into broken pediments and, during the Chippendale period, were embellished with elaborate scrolls. Clocks with flat tops were generally made in rural locales, for generally speaking, stylistic innovations came from seacoast cities.

According to the Booths' essay in the show catalogue, most tall-case clocks encountered today have one of the following five types of movements: thirty-hour brass movements with an endless chain or rape; eight-day brass movements with two weights; thirty-hour wooden movements (made in Connecticut); eight-day wooden movements; or thirty-day brass devices. In clocks made along the Atlantic coast, eight-day brass movements are the most common.

Dials became more and more elaborate with the passage of time, and some clockmakers employed artists to decorate them. Most eighteenth- century clock faces bear Roman numerals, and I[II is often substituted for IV to balance the VIII on the other side of the dial.

The shelf clock was invented in Massachusetts, but it was in Connecticut in the early nineteenth century that this type was first manufactured from mass-produced interchangeable parts, thereby bringing accurate timepieces to a wider population. Standard time zones were agreed upon later in the century introducing the unified system of time we know today.