CHAPTER I.
THE NECESSITY FOR BETTER SKILL AMONG CLOCKMAKERS.
The need for information of an exact and reliable character in regard to the hard worked and much abused clock has, we presume, been felt by every one who entered the trade. This information exists, of course, but it is scattered through such a wide range of publications and is found in them in such a fragmentary form that by the time a workman is sufficiently acquainted with the literature of the trade to know where to look for such information he no longer feels the necessity of acquiring it.
The continuous decrease in the prices of watches and the consequent rapid increase in their use has caused the neglect of the pendulum timekeepers to such an extent that good clock men are very scarce, while botches are universal. When we reflect that the average ‘life’ of a worker at the bench is rarely more than twenty years, we can readily see that information by verbal instruction is rapidly being lost, as each apprentice rushes through clock work as hastily as possible in order to do watch work and consequently each “watchmaker” knows less of clocks than his predecessor and is therefore less fitted to instruct apprentices in his turn.
The striking clock will always continue to be the timekeeper of the household and we are still dependent upon the compensating pendulum, in conjunction with the fixed stars, for the basis of our timekeeping system, upon which our commercial and legal calendars and the movements of our ships and railroad trains depend, so that an accurate knowledge of its construction and behavior forms the essential basis of the largest part of our business and social systems, while the watches for which it is slighted are themselves regulated and adjusted at the factories by the compensated pendulum.
The rapid increase in the dissemination of “standard time” and the compulsory use of watches having a maximum variation of five seconds a week by railway employees has so increased the standard of accuracy demanded by the general public that it is no longer possible to make careless work “go” with them, and, if they accept it at all, they are apt to make serious deductions from their estimate of the watchmaker’s skill and immediately transfer their custom to some one who is more thorough.
The apprentice, when he first gets an opportunity to examine a clock movement, usually considers it a very mysterious machine. Later on, if he handles many clocks of the simple order, he becomes tolerably familiar with the time train; but he seldom becomes confident of his ability regarding the striking part, the alarm and the escapement, chiefly because the employer and the older workmen get tired of telling him the same things repeatedly, or because they were similarly treated in their youth, and consider clocks a nuisance, any how, never having learned clock work thoroughly, and therefore being unable to appreciate it. In consequence of such treatment the boy makes a few spasmodic efforts to learn the portions of the business that puzzle him, and then gives it up, and thereafter does as little as possible to clocks, but begs continually to be put on watch work.
We know of a shop where two and sometimes three workmen (the best in the shop, too) are constantly employed upon clocks which country jewelers have failed to repair. If clock work is dull they will go upon watch work (and they do good work, too), but they enjoy the clocks and will do them in preference to watches, claiming that there is greater variety and more interest in the work than can be found in fitting factory made material into watches, which consist of a time train only. Two of these men have become famous, and are frequently sent for to take care of complicated clocks, with musical and mechanical figure attachments, tower, chimes, etc. The third is much younger, but is rapidly perfecting himself, and is already competent to rebuild minute repeaters and other sorts of the finer kinds of French clocks. He now totally neglects watch work, saying that the clocks give him more money and more fun.
We are confident that this would be also the case with many another American youth if he could find some one to patiently instruct him in the few indispensable facts which lie at the bottom of so much that is mysterious and from which he now turns in disgust. The object of these articles is to explain to the apprentice the mysteries of pendulums, escapements, gearing of trains, and the whole technical scheme of these measurers of time, in such a way that hereafter he may be able to answer his own questions, because he will be familiar with the facts on which they depend.
Many workmen in the trade are already incompetent to teach clockwork to anybody, owing to the slighting process above referred to; and the frequent demands for a book on clocks have therefore induced the writer to undertake its compilation. Works on the subject—nominally so, at least—are in existence, but it will generally be found on examination that they are written by outsiders, not by workmen, and that they treat the subject historically, or from the standpoint of the artistic or the curious. Any information regarding the mechanical movements is fragmentary, if found in them at all, and they are better fitted for the amusement of the general public than for the youth or man who wants to know “how and why.” These facts have impelled the writer to ignore history and art in considering the subject; to treat the clock as an existing mechanism which must be understood and made to perform its functions correctly; and to consider cases merely as housings of mechanism, regardless of how beautiful, strange or commonplace those housings may be.