Articles' list >>> The National Watch and Clock Museum
The National Watch and Clock Museum, situated in Lancaster County, Pa., is acknowledged to house the largest and most complete chorological collection in North America.
The Museum’s History
The museum originated from the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors, established in 1943 as the result of the joined efforts of hobbyists, educators, collectors, students and some watch connoisseurs. By the early 1950s, the association's secretary, collector Earl Strickler, the secretary of the organization managed to raise enough money to hire a staff to help him fulfill work in the association.
In 1971 the association acquired a building with the aim to open a museum and station the association's administration. In 1977, the nonprofit museum with fewer than 1,000 items welcomed everybody interested in the art of timekeeping.
The next stage in the history of the museum was a $7 million renovation concluded in 1999. The museum premises became twice as large featuring an absolutely new and redesigned exhibit space and a new two-story addition, a staff has grown to 30 people that take care of the extensive collection and 15,000 annual visitors, and the association has comprised 26,000 members from 55 countries.
The Museum’s Collection
The museum’s international in scope collection consists of over 12,000 items with about 20 percent being displayed. It covers a wide range of clocks, watches, tools, and other time-related mechanisms. The collection is particularly focused on nineteenth-century American clocks and watches. Additional museum’s collections feature early English Tallcase clocks, Asian timepieces produced in Japan and China, and timekeeping devices from Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Russia. Chronologically, the collection’s exhibits make all the visitors acquainted with all the history of timekeeping technology beginning with early non-mechanical devices to modern atomic and radio controlled clocks. The museum organizes special temporary exhibitions. Previous exhibits have demonstrated military timekeeping, fine timepieces from around the world, Civil War timepieces, and American Tallcase clocks.
The museum also comprises a library and research center with nearly 5,000 sources of information - computers, video records, books and journals giving the public a wonderful opportunity to research the treasury of the clocks and watches history received from our ancestors or purchased in antique stores. On the second Saturday of every month everybody may participate in different programs and meet interesting speakers.
Some Special Items
The visitors will de fascinated to discover some remarkable items in the museum’s collection. There is a table clock dated from 1570, sundials from the 17th century and an Asian antique clock with a stick of incense burning for exactly one hour. At the end of that hour, a ball is dropped provoking the noise alerting those in earshot of the time.
The 18th-century gallery presents musical clocks produced in the late 1700s. An elaborate German glass bell musical clock, called Black Forest musical clock, possesses a wooden movement with verge escapement .The 30-hour movement strikes the quarter-hour and hour. The clock plays six melodies twice, when they are manually selected, on nine original glass bells. The carved and painted wooden dial demonstrates a heraldic crest with crown. Two standing lions are on the both sides of the chapter ring. Gold and silver leaf underlines the red and blue paint.
The conical pendulum statue clock, created in 1875, is another fine clock in the museum’s collection. This is an 11-foot French clock made by a Monsieur E. Farcot to be displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. It features a silver-bronze statue of a woman and a marble-and-onyx base. The clock’s pendulum fixed at the woman's hand swings not typically from side to side but conically.
The special exhibit in the 19th-century collection is an alarm clock created in Paris by Monsieur H. Laresche for a very noble client, Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. The alarm clock does not go off at a specific time, but rather after a certain period of time.
A recent temporary show - through June 2006 – has been designed to charm all ages. The exhibition of American Pop Culture Timepieces comprises over 125 timepieces, many of which were given as awards by cereal manufacturers, such as Cocoa Puffs, Lucky Charms and Cheerios.
One visit to this interesting place may forever change your attitude to wristwatches and watchmaking in general. You will perceive it not just as a humble thing in our everyday life, but as a sophisticated art of making timepieces and the science of measuring time.
| 
