Today, a cheap clock is worth more than it seems.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Imagine early 19th-century
life in the American Midwest. Imagine the primitive
rural land that gave us Abe Lincoln. The survival
technologies in that harsh land were very like the
ones that people used in medieval Europe.
The last great technology to appear in medieval
Europe was the mechanical clock. The mechanical
clock likewise entered the American Midwest as soon
as basic survival was secure. Abe Lincoln's boyhood
home in Kentucky certainly had no clock on its
mantel. But you can bet that his teenage home in
Frontier farm life began and ended with the sun. No
one carried appointment books. The only reason
anyone needed a clock was for status. A wealthy
city-dweller might own one, but not a farmer. Then
Eli Terry came along, and all that changed.
Terry was a clock-maker, born in 1780. In those
days, clock-makers made one clock at a time. They
made them from either wood or brass. Brass clocks
cost more, of course. But wooden clocks did well
enough, when they didn't suffer too much change in
humidity or temperature. Of course that's exactly
what they did suffer in early rural America.
Then Terry invented a scheme of mass production --
one of the earliest such schemes. He set up his new
machinery in 1800. Two years later, he loaded 200
wooden clocks on a wagon and set out to sell them
at $30 a pop. He soon cut that back to $15. In 1814
he unveiled his Terry 30-hour clock. You had to
wind it only once a day. You had six hours of
grace, if you forgot.
Terry used itinerant peddlers to sell his clocks.
Those snake-oil salesmen added Terry clocks to
their carts of pots, cloth, and remedies. And they
knew their way in the outback.
"Keep the clock for nothing. I'll pick it up when I come back next month,"
one would say. If the wooden gears were
malfunctioning by then, no matter. The family was
now in love with the clock. It was, after all, the
only thing of beauty in a hard world. The salesman
would exchange clocks, collect his $15, fix up the
used one, and head down the road to the next
Peddlers were soon served by steamboats that filled
the vast American West with goods. But those funny,
ill-running, unneeded, wooden-geared clocks brought
the first measure of beauty and elegance into the
lives of bare-subsistence farmers. They were pale
reflections of real clocks, but they spoke
civilization to people who were there because they
meant to make civilization. Clocks spelled order
and pattern and the good life. And that's what
followed -- order, pattern, and the good life --
right on their heels.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
Hawke, D.F., Nuts and Bolts of the Past.
New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988, Chapter
For more on Eli Terry, see Episode 1368.
An Eli Terry Clock
Wooden clockwork made by a Terry contemporary
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2004 by John H.