Click to view flipbook versionFig. 25: The Finished Clock in the Hallway
THE JOURNEY FROM New Haven to Cheshire had taken nearly an hour, but the rain had held off, and the day, though muggy, was not overly warm. A pleasant enough trip. After asking directions in town, the man found Mr. Beadle’s house, a small cottage fronted by a flower garden and low hedge. He reigned in the horse, directed him onto the track adjacent to the cottage and coming to a stop, dropped the tether and climbed down from the phaeton. Edgar Beadle greeted him at the door. “Come in, sir. I hope you found me without too much trouble? I have the clock right here in the kitchen.”
The man, a trim gentleman in his early thirties, removed his gloves and derby, ducking slightly as he entered. He had traveled that morning from the city, a trip of some 17 miles, in response to an ad in the Register. Mr. Beadle had an old clock for sale, a pendulum works in a tall case. He was asking twenty dollars, a reasonable enough sum, and the man felt it was worth the journey to see the clock. He was hoping to find a handsome timekeeper for the entrance hall of the home he had just built on Camden Avenue in the city.
“It was my father’s,” the seller said as he escorted the man into the kitchen. “Quite old, I believe.”
The tall clock stood in one corner next to a shelf filled with canning jars. Its vertical case was stained and the glass was missing from the dial face window. One of the bonnet’s finials was gone.
“It still keeps very good time,” Mr. Beadle said. “But only when I remember to wind it.” He chuckled.
The clock’s steady tick-tock, tick-tock testified to its functionality, but the man pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket. “Seven minutes slow,” he murmured. He stooped to inspect the case’s pendulum door. “No latch, I see.”
“Oh, yes, that’s been missing for quite some time now. But it opens quite easily.” Beadle demonstrated, prying the door loose with a butter knife. Inside, the clock’s weights hung listlessly, rusty cylinders suspended on frayed cords. The man caught a whiff of mold.
“Not quite what I expected,” he said. “But you say it’s old? It certainly looks it.”
“Indeed. My father said the works are from 1810.”
“Well, I’ll have to replace the case and rebuild the bonnet. Are you negotiable on the price?”
* * *
AFTER COMING TO TERMS, the man had the big clock shipped to his company’s shop in New Haven. He was a partner in a prominent carriage manufacturing firm in the city, and though his responsibilities were primarily clerical and financial, he was also a skilled woodworker and cabinetmaker. He planned to spend evenings and weekends creating a fine new case for his purchase. He also intended to modify the clock’s works from a thirty-hour movement, needing to be wound daily, to an eight-day mechanism, requiring only a single weekly winding.
The new case’s planks were mahogany, wood the company primarily used in its patented steaming process to create its unique bent-wood carriage bodies. For the clock’s bonnet and trim, the man chose cherry wood for its fine grain pattern and warm auburn hue. The case’s overall design he based on a line of tall clocks built by Winchester clockmaker Riley Whiting in the 1820s. They were quite unlike the more popular and highly ornate timekeepers made by the Willard brothers of Grafton, Massachusetts. The man found the Whiting cases’ understated elegance far more tasteful with their clean lines and harmonious proportions.
Throughout the summer of 1894, the man worked on his clock. The case was constructed of single mahogany boards, five-eighths of an inch thick, joined to form a long box measuring seven feet in height, though its front panel was shorter by twenty-two inches to leave space for the clock’s dial. In cross-section, the case measured fourteen by eight inches, with the larger dimension the width of its front and rear panels. The man used the factory’s big steam-powered planing machine to true the boards, squaring their edges and adjusting their thickness. Any stock marred by knots or checking was rejected. The remaining work, including saw cuts, mortises, shaping and joinery, was done entirely by hand using the company’s selection of specialized woodworking tools.
After completing the case’s basic box, the man affixed to its lower section a base measuring twelve inches high by sixteen inches wide and ten inches deep. To create a visual transition between the sections, he added cyma recta-style molding in cherry wood to the base’s top edge. The waist section of the case extended forty-eight inches above the base, and it too received the molding at the top, mirroring that of the base. In the center of the waist’s front panel, the man sawed a seven by twenty-seven inch opening for access to the clock’s pendulum and weights. From another piece of mahogany, he fashioned a door for the opening, trimming its edges with strips of cherry and mortising slots for brass hinges. On its opposite edge, he drilled holes for a brass handle and its escutcheon, and carefully carved out a roundel on the door’s backside to allow the handle’s latch to rotate freely.
With the lower and mid-portions of the case completed, the man began work on the clock’s bonnet or hood. A three-sided box, the hood measured sixteen inches wide and ten inches deep, similar to the case’s base, but was eighteen inches in height. Crowning the hood was an arched pediment, adding at its crest another four inches to its vertical dimension. The hood’s sides, constructed entirely of cherry wood, used a stile-and-rail configuration with hidden mortises and tenons to enclose handsomely grained floating panels. The front of the hood was fitted with a dial door of similar construction, but beveled slots in the rails and stiles fitted a glass pane rather than a cherry panel. Because the door’s top rail was arched to accommodate the curve of the hood’s pediment, it had to be carefully shaped by hand. Hinge slots were mortised into the door’s right-hand stile and a brass knob was screwed into the left. The pediment itself was formed by a single arched rail attached to the side frames using dowel joints. To cover the hood, the man used a sheet of 16-gauge steel, cut to fit and bent in the middle to conform to the pediment arch with angled flanges on both sides. He then drilled holes along the cover’s front and side edges and screwed it to the hood’s rails.
Once the hood assembly was completed, the man shaped crown molding to fit the top edges of its sides and carefully carved a second curved piece for the front. To the molding he attached five small “chimney” blocks, one on each of the hood’s corners, and one centered on the pediment arch. These held four ball-style finials and a single spire finial, each turned on the lathe from a block of cherry wood. When completed, the new clock case stood seven feet, four inches tall, and was an impressive repository for Mr. Beadle’s vintage pendulum movement.
That movement was unquestionably old, perhaps even older than the 1810 date Beadle had cited. Its gears or “wheels” were made of cherry wood and the two framing “plates” that held them were constructed from three-eighths inch oak. The pendulum arm was a thirty-four-inch strip of walnut with a two-inch threaded brass rod with adjustable thumb screw that held a one-pound round weight or “bob.” The drive weights, each about fourteen pounds, were suspended from the works’ drive “barrels” – one for the movement and a second for the strike mechanism – by cords of waxed flax. Though the clock functioned well enough, the man could see that it had been crudely repaired in places by its previous owner and would require a bit of restoration. Additional drive wheels would also be needed to upgrade the mechanism to an eight-day movement. The man began that work by removing the clock’s hands and dial face.
Fig. 23: Silas Hoadley
Though the plates bore no imprint indicating the maker, the man could see that the works closely resembled clock movements made by Connecticut horologist Eli Terry between 1795 and 1807. Terry became a pioneer in the mass production of smaller shelf clock mechanisms after those dates, but his early timekeepers were hand-built tall clocks. The Beadle works could have been by Terry, but they also might have been made by Silas Hoadley, one of Terry’s partners. Hoadley took over Terry’s operation in 1810, a date that corresponded with what the man had been told when he purchased the clock. Hoadley, he decided, was most likely the clockmaker who had constructed the movement.
It was a movement that was typical of early 19th century clock works [Fig. 24]. Its lower section consisted of two drive barrels around which the weight cords were wound. The barrel on the right drove the time wheels while its counterpart on the left powered the strike mechanism. At one end of the time barrel was a large drive wheel. It meshed with the pinion of the main wheel whose pinion in turn drove the second wheel and pinion which connected to the third wheel. The third wheel’s pinion powered the clock’s escapement, the source of the familiar tick-tock of pendulum clocks. It consisted of a small lever or “anchor” attached to the pendulum arm. As the pendulum swung, the anchor rocked back and forth, checking and then releasing the teeth of the escapement wheel. That wheel was geared to make one complete rotation each minute and thus was attached to the clock’s second hand. The main and second wheels drove the clock’s hour and minute hands.
The strike mechanism was more complicated. It involved a “warning” wheel which armed the “strike” wheel as the minute hand approached the hour. A “count” wheel controlled the number of strikes the hammer arm would make against a cast iron bell mounted on top of the clock frame. A series of levers, mounted on spindles or “arbors,” would start the strike drive at the top of the hour and stop it once the correct number of hours had rung. Though later strike mechanisms often marked the half hour and even the quarter hour, the Beadle movement only sounded on the hour.
Fig. 24: A Typical Clock Movement
The process of converting the works to an eight-day movement required the addition of larger drive wheels. From a local clock maker, the man purchased two heavy steel gears and corresponding pinions. Those he fitted with the barrels from the original drive wheels and added them to new arbors at the bottom of the works, cutting slots in its oak base to accommodate them. To strengthen the base and ensure that it could support the added weight, the man screwed a maple brace across the length of its back edge. With that work done and repairs made to a few cracked arbors and loose wheels, the man closed up the works and replaced the dial and hands.
The clock’s face was a curiosity. It was clearly not the movement’s original dial, as it was square in shape and did not have the usual curved top edge that fitted into the tall clock’s bonnet pediment. Instead, it appeared to have come from a shelf clock, a variety that commonly featured square faces. Because the hand-painted cornucopia decorations in each to the dial’s corners featured a certain amount of gold-leafed impasto, the man was confident that the dial was the creation of Riley Whiting’s shop. He liked its finely rendered numbers and simple lines, so he decided to keep it. To fill the open space created by the arch of the pediment, he cut a corresponding shape from a sheet of tin and used oil paints to decorate it with a starry night sky and smiling moon. Because tall clocks often featured a rotating moon in that space to track its phases, the man’s painted insert gave the clock the appearance of a more elaborate mechanism.
With the mechanical work completed, the man gave the case and bonnet several coats of high gloss varnish, the same finish the company used on its carriage bodies. He lightly sanded the surfaces between each coat, and after allowing the varnish to cure for a week, waxed and buffed the finish to give the wood a rich, warm luster. When he was satisfied with the look of the case, he had the big clock carefully transported to his home on Camden Avenue. Once there, it was set up in the house’s foyer and its pendulum adjusted so that the clock kept time accurately [Fig. 25]. Its steady tick-tocking provided the entrance hallway with a soothing pulse and its hourly bell strikes sounded throughout the house, marking time’s passage.
“What a fine clock you’ve built!” said the man’s wife. “It’s kept you away for me these many summer evenings, but now I almost think your absence was worth it.”
“I’m delighted you like it, my dear. This clock will count the hours of our lives together, and will be passed down in our family for generations to come,” he said. And then, with a mischievous smile, he added, “So don’t you think we’d better get started creating those generations?”