Today, clocks for the rich and clocks for the poor.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The American system of
manufacturing with interchangeable parts was
embryonic in the early 19th century when a man
named Eli Terry began
using it to make crude wooden clocks. Now I find a
book published in 1903. It is Clocks, Watches,
and Bells by a man named Grimthorpe, president
of the British Horological Institute. This
Grimthorpe knows he's somebody. He exudes
confidence in his and England's clockmaking
superiority. When I look him up, I find he was born
in England the year after Napoleon's defeat at
Waterloo, and he died not long before WW-I.
At first, Grimthorpe took up law. He made his name
as a mean bulldog of a lawyer. Then he began
writing tracts on ecclesiastical politics -- issues
like the acceptability of marrying your dead wife's
sister. He tore into every form of high church, and
he strongly opposed revisions of the King James
Bible. He built such notoriety on all that combat
that he was made a baron. But out of his noisy life
emerged a focus: his interest in church
architecture and bell towers evolved into genuine
expertise in clockwork.
Grimthorpe wrote the first edition of his book on
clockwork in 1850. So my edition is a distillation
of over fifty years' work on clocks. He designed
scores of major bell-tower clocks -- Westminster,
St. Paul's. Even the Big Ben clock was his design.
Yet he did it all to a backdrop of contention and
lawsuits.
His book describes gear trains, the mathematics of
pendulums, ringing systems. He describes every
conceivable escapement mechanism. Of American
clocks he says that they vary greatly in quality,
that some of them use his own escapement design,
and that we make our pendulums too lightweight. But
the fun begins when he talks about Eli Terry, who
created the low-end American clock market by
hawking cheap wooden clocks to homesteaders.
Grimthorpe calls Terry the Sam Slick of
clockmaking.
Sam Slick was an enormously popular fictional
character created in Canada in 1838 by another
wealthy conservative lawyer. Slick was a garrulous
Connecticut clock-maker who peddled cheap clocks in
Canada. The Sam Slick stories warned Canadians
against upsetting their trade balance with tacky
U.S. imports.
Today, the conservative voice of Grimthorpe has
been forgotten, while the real Eli Terry and the
fictional Sam Slick live on. If we don't remember
Sam Slick himself, we do remember his sayings. It
was Slick who first said: "The early bird gets the
worm" and (with a coy nod to Terry) "Don't take any
wooden nickels."
But it was Terry who did with clocks what Henry
Ford later did with automobiles. He moved a
technology from homes of the wealthy into common
life. Terry's clocks never came within a country
mile of Grimthorpe's Parliament buildings. But they
did bring a first breath of grace and civilization
into the cabins of our early West.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Lord Grimthorpe's given name, before he received
his title, was Edmund Beckett. He published many
books. The one I refer to was
Beckett, E., Lord Grimthorpe, A Rudimentary
Treatise on Clocks, Watches, & Bells for
Public Purposes. London: Crosby Lockwood and
Son, 1903.
Sam Slick was created by Thomas Chandler
Haliburton, a judge and resident of Windsor, Nova
Scotia, in the early 19th century. The first of
these was
Haliburton, T. C., The Clockmaker; or the
Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick, of
Slickville. Philadelphia: Carey Lea and
Blanchard, 1838. (This book has been reprinted
as: Haliburton, T. C., The Clockmaker.
Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1969.)
I am grateful to Nancy Day, Linda Hall Library,
Kansas City, for providing the Grimthorpe
source.
From Clocks, Watches, and Bells,
1903
Once of Grimthorpe's illustrations
of an escapement mechanism
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1998 by John H.
Lienhard
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