Time Telling through the Ages

by Harry Chase Brearley

Some of the original clocks are still running in the very farmhouses where Eli Terry succeeded in selling them, and where they have ticked off the minutes of American history since the days of Adams and Jefferson. They were truly remarkable clocks, in spite of the fact that their works were cut out of hard wood with country tools, and put together by a carpenter.

The first American clocks were made of wood, and most of the early clockmakers were at first carpenters. We have seen clockmakers developing from priests and astronomers and blacksmiths and locksmiths and jewelers; but here is a new gateway to the trade. This came about naturally enough in a country where the cheapest and most plentiful material was wood, and where the carpenter and joiner was accustomed to constructing every possible thing of it. Eli Terry of Connecticut was one of the best known of these early New England craftsmen. He was born in East Windsor, just a few years before the Revolution. By the time that he was twenty, he had made a few clocks, cutting the wheels out of hard wood with saw and file, and making wooden hands, dials, and cases. Then he moved to Plymouth, not far from Waterbury, and set up a small shop where he employed several workmen. They would make a dozen or two at a time, entirely by hand. Then Terry would take these out and sell them, sometimes as far as the "new country" across the New York state line.

It took a long time to make a clock in this way, even for fingers that were as clever as Terry's, and it is no wonder that he was compelled to charge from twenty to forty dollars apiece, a sum, which, by-the-way, would be equal to at least four times as much to-day according to the difference in the purchasing power of money. We must remember, too, that a family then bought its clock as it bought a wagon or a spinning-wheel, almost as a man buys his house to-day. Certainly it was a far more important transaction relatively than the purchase of a motor-car.

Probably, if one could have overheard some of these roadside clock-sales it would have been noted that the bargaining was not all upon one side, for there was not a great deal of money in circulation, and people were very apt to "swap." Likely as not, Terry would have to take his payment in lumber, in clothing, or in some other commodity and these, in turn, he would dispose of when an opportunity presented itself. This was more or less the type of the old horseback Yankee trader of the days when men still remembered the Revolutionary War. These were the days when a man who produced some one thing might be forced, in order to realize on its value, to trade it for almost anything else.

When we think of the early American timepiece, we generally picture to ourselves the so-called "Grandfather's Clock," the kind with the tall case which Longfellow wrote about as standing on a turning in the stair and ticking away: "Forever!" "Never!" "Never!" "Forever!" as it marked the passage of the years. But Eli Terry, the first of all American clock-makers, could not well carry such a big contrivance with him on his horseback trips; therefore, while he made the works for these clocks, he left it for other people to construct the cases; the clocks which he sold complete were those which could stand upon a shelf or hang upon the wall.

After a time, his orders increased to a point where he felt justified in moving into an old water-power mill and rigging machinery to do some parts of the work. Thus we find machinery used in American clock-making almost from the beginning of the industry. Terry thus was a real manufacturer; he had grasped the importance of machine production in contrast to hand-craftsmanship.

The move paid; it cut the cost of making nearly in half and greatly increased the output. He now could afford to sell his clocks more cheaply, and the business grew at once. After a while he began to make clocks in lots of one or two hundred and then, indeed, his neighbors shook their heads gravely.

"You are losing your mind, Eli," they told him, in solemn warning. "The first thing you know, the country will be so full of clocks that there will be no market for them. You are getting reckless and ruining your business."

But Eli Terry followed his own judgment instead of that of the croakers; before he died he was making ten or twelve thousand clocks in a year and was selling them too. They brought him a fortune.

Thus was the industry of making timepieces born in America. It began in New England, which is still the chief center of manufacture, and it began with clocks, not watches, for the simple reason that in those days, a watch was a luxury whereas a clock was a necessity. Like the watch industry in Switzerland, American clock-making was an active business from the start, and, as we have seen, the man with whom it started was a typically Yankee combination of ingenious mind, skilful fingers, and a knack for business.