Timepieces
by David Christianson
I have a long history with clocks and watches. One of the fires I started as a child resulted from an attempt to fix an alarm clock while it was plugged in. (A working clock, it's only fair to add.) My first wristwatch, when I was in the Boy Scouts, got magnetized and inexplicably started gaining two minutes an hour. A long history but not always a happy one. My grandfather, on the other hand, spent years looking for a watch that wouldn't have to be regulated every six weeks. In a spirit of experimentation, he bought an early quartz watch and was so delighted with its steadiness that he would not fiddle with it on "leap forward" day . . . so he put it in a drawer and bought a second one already set to daylight time.
People of my age have relationships with timepieces. We fit right into David Christianson's program. The author is a master watchmaker with a deep love for mechanical clocks and watches. He understands them profoundly and wants you to understand something about them too. His book, besides being filled with excellent pictures, conveys a lot about a technology and an art that shapes your day every day.
One of your clocks carries on an 800-year tradition, or it could be a full thousand, by waking you at the proper time for your rituals. Every monastery had some shlub whose job was to ring the bell for pre-dawn prayers, and he in turn had a "timer" to wake him. It may have been a water-clock with an alarm bell, or it may have been one of those modern inventions, a machine that made a shocking noise at a predictable hour. That mechanical timer stands out in a rather technology-poor Western world: We invented it with, apparently, no input from the Arabs or the Chinese.
The timer had a power source (weights and a string wound on a drum) and a frequency standard (a part that goes tick-tock at a constant pace). It wasn't a clock because it had no display (dial, hands, figurines of woodcutters) and wasn't meant to run continuously. All the Church required was the guy to ring the bell, and the sundial told the hours for most of the workday, so the monks didn't need a full clock.
Who did? You know already: anybody who had to do business. (Your office clock and your wristwatch are part of a pretty long tradition too.) As markets grew and industries emerged, towns erected clocks to provide an objective signal or standard for merchants and employers. Clockmakers—often blacksmiths with a flair for precision work—traveled the country designing and building "community" clocks for prosperous towns. These were real clocks, with dials as well as chimes to ring the hours, and a few of them still exist.
Christianson can't resist talking about the mechanics, nor would you want him to. He uses well-drawn illustrations to show how the "crown-and-verge escapement" served as frequency standard for several centuries' worth of timepieces. It's a bulky thing and looks as if it would take a lot of coddling, but a well-designed and properly maintained crown-and-verge clock would keep pretty good time, often gaining or losing less than a quarter of an hour per day. (It was built into a tower because its power source depended on weights slowly dropping several feet or tens of feet.)
But the works is not the whole story. If your clock will become a landmark, and it will, you don't want it to look like a pile of rock; you build it in a style and you put some finish on it. And when the clockmakers of a later generation—now running to silversmiths instead of workers in iron—learn to create a timepiece small enough to hang from a chain around your neck, you want an adornment, not just a tick-tock. The case and dial become a focus of the craft along with the movement. Christianson's book is especially strong in pictures of the great achievements in clock- and watchmaking, many shown both assembled and with the innards visible.
The advent of quartz promised the end of the mechanical timepiece, but that promise hasn't been kept. Swiss and other makers keep turning out watches with advanced mechanical escapements, though many of them are premium-priced items. And the craft hasn't vanished either; clock repair technicians have learned to work on both quartz and traditional pieces, and inventors like George Daniels continue to devise newer and better watch components.
I have to say that Christianson impresses me more with breadth than depth. His sympathy with mechanical timepieces equals his access to notable examples, so that in reading you get exposed to the full history of clocks and watches. While the author—speaking as a watchmaker and a historian of the craft—bends every effort toward explaining how these robust machines work, I did not find his accounts of some systems quite satisfying. For example, I am utterly in the dark about the virtues of the "co-axial escapement," a late-20th-century innovation due to Daniels. Even at the simplest level, it took a lot of hand-waving before I could follow the description of the old crown-and-verge escapement. As a fixer of clocks from way back, I would have traded a photo of one reconstructed town clock or the feature on Pope Sylvester II for a couple more in-action drawings of these frequency standards.
Still, it's not often that I can report about a technology book, as I do about Timepieces, that I simply could not put it down. It's a great story told by a writer of skill.
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Timepieces