HISTORIC TIMEPIECES.

Otaki Mail, 1 April 1931, Page 1

HISTORIC TIMEPIECES.

CLOCKMAKERS’ TERCENTENARY. EXHIBITION IN GUILDHALL. The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers will celebrate its tercentenary this year. It was on August 22ud, 1031, "that Charles I. granted a charter constituting the clockmakers a body corporate under the name of “The Master Wardens and Fellowship of the Art and Mystery of Clockmaking of the City of London.” The company will recall some of the eventful history of its three centuries. Already there is an exhibition of clocks and watches in the Guildhall —the company having no hall of its own —which is not onlv one of the most heautitul and remarkable in the world, but shows the steps by which English clockmakers have established a supremacy in skill over clockmakers of all other nations. , The earliest examples are bv foreign craftsmen. The hour-glasses in which the sand runs down in four hours were taken from French Government ships. An exquisite little clock set in a jewelled monstrance came from Augsberg. The smallest watch came from Geneva. It is an eight-day watch, yet the size of the movement is less than a three-penny piece. The rose on the back of the case was painted by an artist in enamel. It was made a century ago, but the cost even then was more than £SO. Near it is a clock-watch 'with Hebrew initials on it so minutely engraved with a steel point that they are invisible to the naked eye.. The most curious clock is oue worked by hydrogen gas generated by the action of diluted sulphuric acid on a ball of zinc. The emergence of native-born genius in eloekmaking begins with a long \ eight-day clock of which the frames, _ wheels and pinions are of solid oak.! It was the first production of John j Harrison, of Earrow, and was made by him in 172 G, while he was still following the trade of a carpenter at Fouibv, near Pontefract, Yorkshire. This was so accurately made that it did not err a second in a month. In 1728, when, he was 35, Harrison went to London to try for the £20,000 offered by the Government for a timekeeper that would enable longitude at sea to be accurately determined. Hi* first instrument was not exact enough to win the £20,000, but he persevered, reducing the error to three or four seconds a week on long tropical sea voyages until he won it in 1705. There is now an 'English-made free pendulum chronometer at Greenwich which, corrects an error of l-200ih part of a second, but this almost infinite accuracy has been made possible by the fine succession of. English clockmakers since the days of Harrison.