The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1905-02-10
CLOCK 400 YEARS OLD RUNS.
Surprising skill Shown by Past Gener-
atiOns in Making Timepieces.

We learn from the French newspa-
pers that among many interesting OBJ
jeets acquired by the state from the
late Princess Mathilde's collection is a
wonderful alarm clock which was
once the pride of the great Napoleon,
and which not only tells the day of the
month and year, the mean solar time
and the phases of the moon. but sounds
every quarter of an hour and is pro-
vided with a thermometer
Few things are more surprising than
the skill of past generations of clock
makers, who not only made timepieces
OF the most complicated character but
Of such excellent workmanship that
they seem almost made for all time
There is at Castletown, in the Isle of
Man, a clock which was telling Manx-
men the time O. day before Oliver
Cromwell was Graded and which might
nave listened to an account of the Ar
mazda from the lips of men who had
seen the Spanish galleons, and this
very clock, which Queen Bess herself
presented to Castle Rushen 307 years
ago, is marking time just as conscien-
tiously for King Edwards subjects in
the twentieth century
At the South Kensington museum
anyone who chooses may see today the
very clock which Peter Lightfoot
made for Glastonbury abbey about
1926, when John Wycliffe was in his
cradle, and another clock which was
L 3.
two years after Crecy was fought. In
1876 this clock was going as smooth
~ as 1t did more than five centuries
before, while the Society of Anti
quaries has a portable clock made at
Prague as long ago as 1928.
In the town of Schramberg, in the
Black forest there is an alarm clock
which warned sleepers it was time to
get up when Charles II was king of
England. 1t was made in 1880 and
is an ingenious piece of Workmanship.
In form it resembles a lantern in
which is lighted candle, the wick
Of which is automatically clipped
every minute by a pair of scissors.
The candle is slowly pushed upward
by a spring, which also controls the
mechanism of the clock, and at the
required hour of waking an alarm is
sounded, and at the same time the
movable sides of the lanter fall and
the room is flooded with light.
A pendulum clock, made in 1882
and once owned by Cromwell, is pre-
served today in the Philadelphia Ii
brary, and another. made in Germany
in 1910, was recently doctored by a
Connecticut clockmaker and is now
running for six months at a time
without winding
In 1877 the Times had an advertisement
of a clock which was warranted to go Tor
a year without winding, a feat which is
claimed for certain clocks advertised in
England today. A similar timepiece to
the one advertised in the Times is to be
seen in William IT'S bed room at Hamp-
ton court It is but a few years since
bracelet watches first excited the wonder
and admiration of Englishwomen, who
scarcely could have been aware that more
than 300 years ago Lord Leicester placed
an almost exactly similar bracelet watch
Queen Eliza beth's wrist
1t is not long since a native of Milan
made a clock entirely of bread. He was
a poor man and every day for three years
he set apart portion of his daily bread
which by a process of which he would not
divulge the secret he was able to make as
hard as metal and insoluble in water and
from these fragments of bread he con-
structed his clock
More ingenious still is NJ LIE BaIIout
of Coutances, who seems able to make
clocks from any material, however SEEM
ingly unsuitable. One clock he fashioned
entirely from old newspapers converted
into pulp another from large and small
sticks held together by wires a third
from discarded tobacco tins and so on
London Tit Bits