His long and eventful life spans the whole growth of the American clock business from the days of Eli Terry and his handsawed wooden movements down to the maturity of the modern business supplying, by factory methods and the use of specialized machinery, millions of clocks to all parts of the world. He had made clocks all over Connecticut, in Plymouth, Farmington, Bristol, New Haven and Waterbury, as well as in Massachusetts and, for a time, in South Carolina and Virginia. He had worked with his hands for Terry and Seth Thomas at the old wooden wheels and veneered cases, which were peddled about the country and sold for thirty or forty dollars each to be the treasured timekeepers of many households. And he had headed a modern factory, turning out dollar clocks by the tens of thousands.
It is said that a child in the first few years of its life lives briefly through the whole evolution of civilized mankind. That "infant industry," American clock-making, likewise, in the short space of fifty years passed through most of the steps of the whole growth of time-recording between the Middle Ages and our own era. This country stands now among the leading clock-making nations of the world; its product is famous in every land and a timepiece from Waterbury or New Haven may mark the minutes in the town from which Gerbert was banished for sorcery because he made a time-machine, or in that land between the rivers where the Babylonians first looked out upon the stars.
Most of the American clocks are still made in Connecticut; in fact, more than eighty per cent of the whole world's supply (excluding the German) comes from the Naugatuck Valley. The New Haven Clock Company, which is the successor of the Jerome Company, is to-day one of the largest. As far back as 1860, it was producing some two hundred thousand clocks a year. The Seth Thomas Company and others of the historic concerns are still at work in various portions of the state. And the Benedict & Burnham Company, with which, at one time, Chauncey Jerome was associated, became the Waterbury Clock Company, now regarded as the largest clock producer, and of which we shall hear more later on.
The key-note of the whole development was that new principle which American invention, prompted and stimulated by the pressing necessities of a new nation, brought into the business of time-recording—the principle of marvelously cheapening production-costs without loss of efficiency, through the systematic employment of machinery on a large scale.
As long as the inventive brains and the technical knowledge of the old-time craftsman found expression only through his own fingers, the results would be limited to his individual production, and the costs would be proportionately high. When, however, the master mind was able to operate through rows of machines, each under the supervision of a mechanic trained to its particular function, his inventive genius was provided with ten thousand hands and a hundred thousand fingers. Furthermore, the production gained in quality as well as in quantity, because of specialization, all the time its costs were in process of reduction. This, perhaps, has been America's chief contribution, not only to the making of timepieces, but, also to the world's industry in general.
English Clock about 1700—Floral Marquetry in Walnut Ground
