It was 4 p.m. on the dot when all at once, dozens of clocks of all sizes sounded the most beautiful symphony of dings, dangs, dongs, and coo-coos, and the metal and some wooden gears whirled with buzzing excitement for a few seconds. Then all went quiet again but for the gorgeous and relentless sound of ticking, some loud and some soft in various metal timbres of high and low.
There I sat on a gold cotton velour sofa in the great room erected in 1801, in a town that was the world’s center of mechanical clock production in Bristol, Connecticut. It was this city that by 1850 led producers in the state to make and sell 550,000 clocks in a single year, only to grow from there over the following century.
This was a Saturday in August, and one might have supposed tourists would be everywhere. The emptiness took nothing away from the thrill of the place, which transports you in time to an age in America when clocks belonged to the rich and then gradually became the prized possession of the middle class. With that came increased miniaturization and eventually, in the 20th century, the wristwatch.
Through the history of the American clock, which was a massive industry comparable to that of digital technology today, and easily the most vibrant and productive clock industry in the world, we can discern the history of American democracy and its ideals. It tells the story of the turn from agriculture to the city. On the farm, the sun was sufficient and mealtimes were dictated by sight and feel. But when the trains started running and the population became more urbanized, precision in time for every household began to matter intensely.
American industry was there to assist, and not just with function. These clocks were made to be beautiful also, with gorgeous shapes, styles, charm, and paintings that celebrated the Founding era and American landscapes. They were initially very expensive, but as automation and competition increased, they fell in price. Even by the 1870s, however, few families could afford to buy in cash, so credit terms came to be offered by the sellers. Traveling peddlers—a job for men 21 years of age and older—would go from town to town and sell new products while picking up payments on those they had previously sold.
The clocks we most admire from hundreds of years ago are those that adorned city centers on towers. Such a clock’s sturdy timekeeping for the whole community was backed up in its affirmation of the passage of time by the church bells. Through these sights and sounds, the life of the community became orderly, a constructed social ritual of productive and punctual people.
The museum has one of these giant works of art, too, a mid-19th-century model, displayed and working so that visitors can observe its operations on three floors, including the weight that sinks to the floor and then each week is elevated up some 30 feet to start the regulator over again.
I don’t have the mind of an engineer, so I just marvel at the sizes and operations of the synchronized gears that flow from one size to another and finally land in the perfect but barely visible movements of the largest gear that directly operates the hands of the clock. And when you think about the ingenuity of the whole thing, it boggles the mind. And it causes the imagination to race.
Probably the best way to start the tour is with the sundial on the back porch, which I’m quite sure I did not know how to read until this trip. It’s a snap. The dial is set to point north and cast a shadow depending on where the sun is overhead, such that at the noon hour the shadow disappears. From there, you can see the hours pass through the Roman numerals until sundown, after which it becomes impossible to tell the time until sunrise. It is from this face that we get the clock face we know now.
Or perhaps many people today don’t know how to tell time unless it is flashing in digital numbers on a screen? I really don’t know where we stand on this. But the bookstore contained many books for kids on how to tell time. It also had Hardy Boys books, written some 75 years ago and designed for 10-year-olds but with language so elaborate and vocabulary so rich that I seriously doubt that 1 in 1,000 kids could even read them today, even though they were written some 75 years ago.
The literacy of the past is inconceivable today, reversing the course of history from the growing literacy we marveled at of the early 19th century and following. Now we marvel at the opposite. Perhaps it is also true in industry: I often thought while touring this museum that no living person could recreate these beautiful things.
Back to the history of clocks. How we went from the sundial to the civic clock with weights is a remarkable tribute to the human mind and its desire to obtain mastery over the elements, which Sigmund Freud identified as the very first sign of civilization itself. From there, and over time, the clock became smaller and more obtainable by regular families.
One of them is called the “school regulator” and it is quite beautiful, but suddenly it occurred to me: Before schools had clocks, they likely could not tell when to convene and dismiss classes!
The production and distribution of clocks made possible working times, shift changes, and family schedules. The household clock turned guesswork into precision. The luxury became a necessity and then owned by everyone. This is the story of American economic and social progress.
One of the most fascinating clocks in the museum—a slice of time—had two faces, one for railroad time and one for local time. What in the world could this mean? Before 1883, every town and arguably every house had a different time set by the moment at which the sun was directly overhead. So of course it was not the same time everywhere. And the United States was fine with that, until the railroads came along and you can move over such distances so quickly—faster than the sun itself.
That’s when the industry came up with the idea of time zones. Hilariously, local towns resisted the switch with great ferocity, with many townspeople decrying the imperious railroad monopolists for daring to rearrange what God himself had made to be true. I find that rather charming. In fact, I wonder whether I would have been among them! In any case, it took 10 years, but finally most of the nation was observing time zones. Railroad time became time itself.
Having spent probably 20 minutes examining the operations of the massive clocks, it nearly knocked me out to observe a case filled with pocket watches with the front and back both open. The invention of the spring had long ago replaced the massive weights, but the intricate layering of the gears is utterly mind-boggling, especially when you consider that these began to appear in waistcoats in the 1860s! It’s astounding really.
By the turn of the 20th century, the American clock reached its apogee of beauty and function, and brilliant integration of the two was available for the everyman. And with every step, the industry expanded and became ever more sophisticated, along with the retail shops, service technicians, and others. And observing all of this makes you realize why the word “technology” simply does not suffice. The proper phrase to describe the industry as a whole, of which clocks were part, is the “practical arts.”
That was the common phrase then, and rightly so.
Where has this industry gone? During World War II, most clockmakers retooled to serve the war effort and then after, they simply could not come back. By the middle of the 1950s, important residents of the city of Bristol decided it was time to establish a museum in homage to what was and what would very well never likely happen again. Today, it is served by many volunteers called “cranks” who swarm the building every Friday to wind the thousands of clocks.
God forbid that they ever stop. It would be a very bad omen.
Years ago, I visited the Smithsonian Museum of Arts and Industry. It was the very first national museum in the United States. It opened in 1881. It is a glorious structure, a mighty homage to everything America was about. That is the whole reason the Smithsonian existed, to preserve pride in what American enterprise had achieved to improve human life.
This museum closed completely in 2004, allegedly because the building was structurally unsound (that’s what they always say), and remained closed until 2021, when it briefly opened for the most ghastly small exhibit ever to appear at the Smithsonian: “FUTURES,” featuring horrid electronic garbage no one would ever want or need.
I strolled through the hallways. The whole thing was utterly dystopian. I asked where the great stuff was: the early telephones, the light bulb, the sound recorders, the phonographs, the sewing machines, the washing machines.
“I guess they are in the basement,” the completely indifferent tour guide said.
Is this where the history of American greatness ends up? In the basement? It need not be so. But from where we are headed, this is the destination unless something changes fast.
