The study of hands is exceptionally interesting; they run through a regular series of styles, as varied as the ornamentation of the cases. Some of the designs are of exquisite balance as specimens of delicate metal-work, in which the English have always been proficient. Their character can be gauged by the expert clockmaker or connoisseur to such a nicety that it can be seen at once if the clock has its original hands or not. Those of my readers who wish to pursue this subject will find the hands adequately treated and well illustrated in English Domestic Clocks, by Mr. Herbert Cesinsky and Mr. Malcolm R. Webster, a volume which no student of clocks should fail to consult as a practical and authoritative work.
In regard to hands, it is curious that the fashion of placing a minute hand to travel around the dial with the hour hand has established a method of reckoning time in a popular manner not in accordance with scientific exactitude. The eye glances at the dial and sees that the minute hand has so many minutes to travel before reaching the next hour. We accordingly say, for instance, it is twenty minutes to four or ten minutes to four. On one half of the dial we have acted quite scientifically in saying it is ten minutes past three or half-past three, but the moment the point of the half hour is reached we act in a different manner. We never speak or think of four thirty-five, four forty, or four fifty, unless we have to consult the railway time-table.
This all comes about by reason of the minute hand being placed as it is. In clocks with the minute hand having a separate dial of its own no such unscientific error would have arisen. The second hand in such clocks travels around the dial and points outside the hour numerals.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE BRACKET CLOCK
The term "bracket clock" a misnomer—The great series of English table or mantel clocks—The evolution of styles—Their competition with French elaboration.
Long-case clocks came into being when the long or "royal" pendulum required protection by having a wooden case. It was possible to have a short pendulum, and clocks intended for table use had a short pendulum. The long pendulum swings exactly in a second, and for it to do this it must be of a certain length, determined by physical laws followed according to mechanical formulæ by the scientific clockmaker, too complex to be given here in detail. It may be interesting to record that the length of a seconds pendulum—that is, one requiring one second to move from extreme to extreme—is 39.1398 inches in the latitude of Greenwich and is of different lengths in differing latitudes.