SOME FAMOUS GLOCKS

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 80, 28 December 1929, Page 27

SOME FAMOUS GLOCKS

LONDON’S GOG AND STETTIN’S BOGEY MAN

Clocks, man’s indispensable aid in his daily joust with time, have, a world all their own. Even as we have ordinary people and those that enjoy the spotlight of fame, so does the clock world have ordinary timepieces and huge and unique ones that bask in the limelight. Size seems to determine importance in the clock universe, for the biggest ones are‘usually the best known. , *

In the matter of large clocks, the United States leads the world-. The Old\ World may have the odd patriarchs of the time-tellers’ universe, but the huge ones are in America. The largest in the world, the Colgate clock, is on top of the Colgate Building in Jersey City. Its thirty-eight-foot dial faces Npw York City and‘ is clearly discernible for a considerable distance along the west side of Manhattan and in parts of Brooklyn. The entire clock weighs six tons and has a minute hand twenty feet long. Illumination at night adds to its usefulness and lengthens the distance of visibility, the face and Hands being outlined with red and white electric bulbs.

The Metropolitan Tower houses the third largest time-teller. The dwellers and toilers in the neighbourhood of Madison Squire are aided by it four twenty-six-foot dials. It also has a series of chimes which ring loudly every fifteen minutes. At night a flash of light accompanies the chimes. It is said that the flashes can be seen in Jackson’s Heights, L.I. While America holds the four largest clocks in the world. Europe has many large and curious ones. ’Probably the most famous of the Old World’s timepieces is London’s Big Ben, which has been serving man since its installation, in 1860. It has four twenty-three-foot dials and is “fth in size, coming close behind that on the City Hall in Philadelphia.

Big. Ben’s dial has figures two feet high, and the minute hands are four? teen feet long, weighing more than 200 pounds each. The hour hands are nine feet long, and much heavier. The pendulum weighs 700 pounds, while Big Ben’s bell weighs thirteen tons. It has been a faithful and accurate servant, and its deviations from exactness are minute fractions of a second, according to the bi-daily check-ups with Greenwich Observatory.

London possesses one of the oddities of the timepiece world in the Gog and Magog clock. This decorates the front of Sir John Bennett’s clock shop. Gog and Magog, London’s legendary giants, are gilded figures that attract many observers when they are striking the hour with their hammers.

One of the most unusual of the world's time-tellers is in Stettin, Germany. It has a large and terrifying face of a bearded man in the centre of the dial, who every second rolls his eyes from side to side in the manner of themythical bogy man. In his mouth he holds a metal place telling the day of the month,, making in all a grotesque picture. It bears the inscription 1736. Still another of the world’s .-oddities is claimed by Germany in the Zodiac clock at Munich, placed at the entrance to the Church of St. Anna 300 years ago. In addition to the ordinary face and hands of a clock, this one nas the signs of the Zodiac on the outer edge. The figures as well as the numbers had to be hand-carved on the solid copper plate that forms the dial. The Zodiac clock has not only kept time faithfully, but has indicated the sun’s, position.

An unusual piece of workmanship is Bohemia’s glass clock. It required several years of painstaking labour for Joseph Thayer, a glass worker of that country, to make this clock entirely of glass, even to the tiniest screw.