Part 12. “I’ll Give 10 Million Dollars To Any One That can Give Me The Time..”

Welcome Back! Today we continue our story of how, as clocks got smaller, so did mechanical music.

We’ll also discover just how this revolutionized our day to day lives.

In the last episode (Part 11). We left off the story just after Dutch Astronomer and Mathematician, Christiaan Huygens, took inspiration from Galileo, invented and then perfected the Pendulum clock.

Not content to rest on his laurels, in 1675 almost 20 years after his invention of the pendulum clock, Huygens developed the balance wheel and spring assembly, enabling portable watches to keep time to about 10 minutes a day.
This assembly was so clever it’s still found today in some wristwatches.

Now portable clocks (normally pocket watches), were both viable and useful.

In 1676 British Clergyman Edward Barlow invented the Repeating clock, and then also claims to have invented the repeating watch 4 years later. This was contested by fellow Englishman Daniel Quare, who was eventually awarded the patent in 1687.
(unfortunately for this story, it was not a contest of arms or even just a friendly game of darts, so you’ll just have to hope this sentence at least has livened the whole thing up a bit).

So what are repeating watches and clocks? (and why aren’t they just called clockclocks?)

As you can imagine, back  before the days of artificial lighting, it could be pretty difficult to read a clock or watch without going to the trouble of lighting a candle with a flint and tinder or trying to find a lamp that was already burning. The repeaters would ‘repeat’ the time by striking a bell, a gong or the watch face itself, this was most commonly the nearest quarter hour.

They were also used for the visually impaired.

It’s interesting to note (i hope) that repeater clocks and watches remained very popular until the mass adoption of the match in the first half of the 19^th Century.

The earliest repeaters struck a bell attached to the casing making them quite bulky, they were also powered by the watch’s mainspring, activated by pushing a button on the crown. This was problematic, in a similar way to batteries on the early mobiles and iPods, ie: regular use would drain the power (on the spring) causing the watches to run down and lose time. Pushing a slide along the side of the case later solved this.

So not only had clocks become smaller, so had sound.  Although it would be a while before music could be made to fit into these portable timepieces.

It was not until 1713, that Frenchman Juline LeRoy, clockmaker to Louie XV added to the miniaturization of time and sound by making the watches thinner, his method was cunning but fiendishly simple; he removed the bell and made the hammer strike the case itself.

The French Court of the time was known  (amongst other things) as the most sophisticated in the land, and it was the following Louie in Succession, Louie XVI who championed the next watchmaker that changed the game.  Both his Highness and his Queen Marie-Antoinette were early supporters of Abraham-Louis Breguet.

Amongst many horological innovations, Breguet is credited as creating the wire gong in 1789. (canned applause)

The Gongs were made of long hardened steel wires that were coiled inside the watchcase. Chiming sounds were created when the repeating mechanism activated tiny hammers.

Repeater watches are much harder to make than repeater clocks, getting the long wire gongs to sit in harmony inside a watch with all the complicated gears and striking works, became a feat of master watch making. As a result of this, repeater watches with gongs became expensive luxuries and status symbols.

Funnily enough it is this exclusivity that enabled it to survive the advent of electric lighting and luminous watch dials.
Even though these factors may have caused it’s popularity to die, the feature has become treasured as an art form and thing of beauty. Repeaters are still found in the most expensive and complex watches of today.

Breguet, is credited as being the inventor of many advancements in clock tech, including a pocket watch designed for Marie-Antoinette which had the most mechanical complications of that period. (more canned applause)

His most amazing call to fame though, was for his 1810 design for Caroline Bonaparte, the Queen of Naples.

A wristwatch. (….silence…)

It only took the rest of the world a mere 200 years to catch up.  (the crowd goes wild)

Today we’ll end the story on a bit of a tangent.

This fits more as a part of the story of the development of the clock, and has no real bearing to our musical journey.

But none the less it’s an interesting diversion..

A major driving force to make clocks as accurate and stable as possible was the sea. Clocks were used by Sailors to measure distance and navigation while at sea.

One of the easiest ways to do this was to observe the sun and work out midday local time, then compare it with their home time (carried on shipboard clocks) they knew that for every hours difference in time they had either traveled 15 degrees east or west (longitude).

To get an accurate home time, British sailors would set their chronometers by the time found at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. This is where we get both the 0 meridian (line of longitude) and why it’s known as Greenwhich mean time.

Back to clocks at sea..

The trouble was, due to often extreme changes in humidity and the rolling of the ship, the highly accurate pendulum clocks become next to useless.

As any advantage on the seas were of utmost importance, in 1714 the British Government offered a prize to whom ever could create a truly accurate chronometer.

A carpenter and self taught clockmaker called John Harrison set to solve the problem. In 1759, after 4 attempts, Harrison perfected his invention of a spring and balance wheel escapement. He built a chronometer called the H5, that looked like a large pocket watch. It was tested on a 10 week return voyage from England to Jamaica and the result was amazing. It lost 1/5^th of a second a day, by the time it had returned to mother England, it had had lost just 5 seconds! His chronometer was actually 10 times more accurate than was needed to win the prize.

And the reward?

£20,000.

This is equivalent to $10,000,000 in today’s currency.
I wonder if at some stage on the journey, as he left the shores of Jamaica, he looked at his pocket chronometer and said

“buddy Jamaican me a rich rich man!”

ahem.. sorry about that couldn’t help myself.

So where does this leave us in the story?

Mechanical Music had arrived in peoples homes through the adoption of clocks.
For many this would be the only music available in the their home, it’s influence was massive.

Clocks had and had become accurate enough to be relied upon to make appointments within the quarter hour.
The development of watches meant that time could be taken with you where ever you went.

This started to change the way people did things, both socially and through business. A whole new paradigm of thinking had began,  as our timepieces became smaller, so too did the pieces of time that we measured things by.

In the next episode where going to finish our story about the miniaturization of time and music, and how it changed our world permanently, and look at an invention that became the 19^th century’s version of the iPod CLICK HERE

CLICK HERE for the previous chapter

CLICK HERE for the INDEX of History Of Electronic Music