Time Telling through the Ages

CHAPTER TWELVE

How An American Industry Came On Horseback

At last the clock industry came to America, and it came on horseback. If you had been upon a dusty country road in Connecticut about the year 1800, you might have seen a plainly dressed young man come riding along with a clock strapped to each side of his saddle and a third fastened crosswise behind him.

"Hello, Eli Terry!" you might have heard some farmer sing out, as the rider drew near.

"Hello, Silas," the other would call back; "don't you think it's about time you bought a clock?"

"Can't afford it, Eli; it takes me a long time to make forty dollars raising wheat."

"Yes; but you can't afford to be without one, Silas." And, dismounting, he would unstrap one of the clocks and bring it up to the stone wall. Then would follow the period of bargaining, so dear to the shrewd, hard-headed sons of Connecticut. Perhaps when young Terry climbed back into the saddle and said "Gid-dap," one of his clocks would stay behind with the farmer. Like most successful salesmen, Terry was a close observer of human nature; he knew that habits once formed are hard to break. He discovered early that if a prospective customer could be made to depend upon a clock for telling time, the clock would soon sell itself. One day, during a rain-storm, he sought refuge in a farmer's home. He brought in with him one of his clocks and placed it on the mantel over the fireplace, explaining that he would like to leave it there, where it would not get wet, while he continued on his journey.

"I'll be back for it in a few days," he said, as he waved good-by.

When Terry returned, some days later, the farmer realized that the clock, which he had first regarded as an extravagance had somehow become a necessity, and, with no urging on Terry's part, the sale was quickly completed.

Some of the original clocks are still running in the very farmhouses where Eli Terry succeeded in selling them, and where they have ticked off the minutes of American history since the days of Adams and Jefferson. They were truly remarkable clocks, in spite of the fact that their works were cut out of hard wood with country tools, and put together by a carpenter.

The first American clocks were made of wood, and most of the early clockmakers were at first carpenters. We have seen clockmakers developing from priests and astronomers and blacksmiths and locksmiths and jewelers; but here is a new gateway to the trade. This came about naturally enough in a country where the cheapest and most plentiful material was wood, and where the carpenter and joiner was accustomed to constructing every possible thing of it. Eli Terry of Connecticut was one of the best known of these early New England craftsmen. He was born in East Windsor, just a few years before the Revolution. By the time that he was twenty, he had made a few clocks, cutting the wheels out of hard wood with saw and file, and making wooden hands, dials, and cases. Then he moved to Plymouth, not far from Waterbury, and set up a small shop where he employed several workmen. They would make a dozen or two at a time, entirely by hand. Then Terry would take these out and sell them, sometimes as far as the "new country" across the New York state line.

It took a long time to make a clock in this way, even for fingers that were as clever as Terry's, and it is no wonder that he was compelled to charge from twenty to forty dollars apiece, a sum, which, by-the-way, would be equal to at least four times as much to-day according to the difference in the purchasing power of money. We must remember, too, that a family then bought its clock as it bought a wagon or a spinning-wheel, almost as a man buys his house to-day. Certainly it was a far more important transaction relatively than the purchase of a motor-car.

Probably, if one could have overheard some of these roadside clock-sales it would have been noted that the bargaining was not all upon one side, for there was not a great deal of money in circulation, and people were very apt to "swap." Likely as not, Terry would have to take his payment in lumber, in clothing, or in some other commodity and these, in turn, he would dispose of when an opportunity presented itself. This was more or less the type of the old horseback Yankee trader of the days when men still remembered the Revolutionary War. These were the days when a man who produced some one thing might be forced, in order to realize on its value, to trade it for almost anything else.

When we think of the early American timepiece, we generally picture to ourselves the so-called "Grandfather's Clock," the kind with the tall case which Longfellow wrote about as standing on a turning in the stair and ticking away: "Forever!" "Never!" "Never!" "Forever!" as it marked the passage of the years. But Eli Terry, the first of all American clock-makers, could not well carry such a big contrivance with him on his horseback trips; therefore, while he made the works for these clocks, he left it for other people to construct the cases; the clocks which he sold complete were those which could stand upon a shelf or hang upon the wall.

After a time, his orders increased to a point where he felt justified in moving into an old water-power mill and rigging machinery to do some parts of the work. Thus we find machinery used in American clock-making almost from the beginning of the industry. Terry thus was a real manufacturer; he had grasped the importance of machine production in contrast to hand-craftsmanship.

The move paid; it cut the cost of making nearly in half and greatly increased the output. He now could afford to sell his clocks more cheaply, and the business grew at once. After a while he began to make clocks in lots of one or two hundred and then, indeed, his neighbors shook their heads gravely.

"You are losing your mind, Eli," they told him, in solemn warning. "The first thing you know, the country will be so full of clocks that there will be no market for them. You are getting reckless and ruining your business."

But Eli Terry followed his own judgment instead of that of the croakers; before he died he was making ten or twelve thousand clocks in a year and was selling them too. They brought him a fortune.

Thus was the industry of making timepieces born in America. It began in New England, which is still the chief center of manufacture, and it began with clocks, not watches, for the simple reason that in those days, a watch was a luxury whereas a clock was a necessity. Like the watch industry in Switzerland, American clock-making was an active business from the start, and, as we have seen, the man with whom it started was a typically Yankee combination of ingenious mind, skilful fingers, and a knack for business.

Of course, the conditions of life in America at that time had a great deal to do with methods used in building up the industry. Instead of a civilization centuries old that had wealth, rank, royalty, and a complete organization of all methods of living, here was a new country learning to do things in its own way.

It is hard for us to imagine the conditions which prevailed when our whole population was a mere fringe of scattered settlements along the Atlantic seaboard; when people made long trips on horseback or by stage-coach and men wore powdered wigs and knickerbockers; when New York was a small town on the lower end of Manhattan Island, and Chicago had not even been dreamed of. Still, it was necessary to tell time, and our thrifty ancestors needs must watch the minutes in order to save them as thriftily as they saved everything else. Not one person out of hundreds, in a country where a living must be wrung from the soil by means of hard work, could afford to own anything so expensive as a watch, but every one felt it necessary to have a clock, if possible, and it became one of the greatest treasures of the home.

This, then, was the market in which Terry and those who followed him had to sell. It was a market that could not afford to pay for ornament but desired practical service at low cost. What was needed, therefore, was a clock that would keep time and cost not a cent more than was absolutely necessary. The American industry was forced to start upon a basis entirely different from that of Europe.

As Eli Terry's business grew, he needed assistance, and he secured the help of a young mechanic named Seth Thomas from West Haven, and the two worked together for some time.

The name of Seth Thomas has appeared upon so many clock-dials that it is perhaps the best known name in all American clock-making. He was a good mechanic, and a good business man, and he had ideas of his own about increasing trade. In the course of time, about the year 1800, he and a man named Silas Hoadley bought the original Terry factory in the old mill, and set up business for themselves. Terry, however, established himself elsewhere and continued to manufacture clocks.

Thus the industry was growing; there were now two factories instead of one. Seth Thomas prospered by adopting each popular fashion or improvement in clocks as it came along and applying it upon as large a scale and as honestly and well as could be done. He built up such a reputation that even to-day, while the name of Seth Thomas on a clock face does not suggest any particular form or style of clock, it is associated with good time keeping and honest workmanship.

The third of the famous old New England clock-makers was Chauncey Jerome. He was a man younger than Terry and Thomas by nearly a generation. Like both of his predecessors he was brought up to the carpenter's trade, and like both of them he was a born New England trader. But of the three, Jerome was perhaps most the inventor and least the man of business. As a boy, he worked for Seth Thomas when Thomas was still building barns and houses. He worked for Eli Terry in the old shop at Plymouth. Then, after a period of soldiering in the War of 1812, he went back to clock-making, sometimes manufacturing by himself and sometimes associated with one or the other of the two older men, or in other firms and enterprises too numerous to follow. Always he seems to have been somewhat of a rolling stone, although in his time he gathered as much moss as the best of them: always he was inclined to experiment with new ideas.

Jerome's carpentering skill caused him to be first interested in the making of cases, and most of the familiar forms of old American clocks – the square clock with pillars at the corners and a scroll top, the clock with a mirror underneath the dial and the like, were designed by Terry and Jerome between them. Later on, when the establishment of brass foundries in Waterbury and Bristol had enabled American makers to construct their work of brass instead of wood, Jerome worked out a design for a brass one-day timepiece in a wooden case, small enough for easy transportation, and cheaper than any clock ever made up to that time. Its price at first, near the place of manufacture, was only five or six dollars, but afterwards this was reduced.

This low-priced clock was as remarkable in its way as was the dollar watch, which it foreshadowed. And like the watch, it would not have been possible except through machine work and quantity production. It was a success at once and Jerome's business rapidly increased. In 1840, he was established in Bristol, turning out the new clocks by the thousand, and rapidly making a fortune. A year or two later, he decided to send a consignment of them to England.

Again, people shook their heads and prophesied failure. "You're losing your mind, Chauncey," they told him as they had told Eli Terry before him.

The older wooden movements could not, of course, endure a sea voyage without swelling and becoming useless. A brass movement could, of course, be sent anywhere, and some of the more expensive ones had been shipped to all parts of the country, yet it seemed absurd enough to send American clocks to England where labor was so cheap – to England, which was then the chief clockmaker of the world. Nevertheless, Jerome persevered, and his son sailed for London with a cargo of the cheap clocks. At first, the English trade would have none of them. No clock so cheap could possibly be good, they said, and Connecticut was the home of "the wooden nutmegs." It was only after great difficulty that they were introduced. Young Jerome got rid of the first few by leaving them about in retail stores, asking no payment for them until sold.

The enterprise was saved by an event which was a joke in itself. The English revenue law at that time permitted the owner of imported goods to fix their taxable value. But the government could take any such property upon payment of a sum ten per cent greater than the owner's valuation. Jerome's clocks were valued at their wholesale price, and were presently seized by the customs officials on the ground that this valuation was fraudulently low.

The elder Jerome chuckled upon learning of this. He was well satisfied to have closed out his first cargo at ten per cent profit, and at once sent over another shipment which was taken over by the customs as promptly as the first. But by the time the third consignment arrived, enough of the clocks had been sold to establish a demand for them among the retailers, and the officials finally conceded that the low price might be a reasonable one after all.

Jerome was not at the height of his prosperity. He had the largest and probably the most profitable clock business in the country; and, in the few years following, his product was exported to all parts of the world. Then the Bristol factory burned down and he moved to New Haven, where the Jerome Manufacturing Company enjoyed a brief period of great success. The business was constantly extended, and the wholesale price of the cheap brass clocks was brought as low as seventy-five cents. This figure seems almost impossibly low for the time, but the authority for it is Jerome's own autobiography.

A few years before the Civil War, the Jerome Company failed and, curiously enough, this failure came about through its connection with that usually successful man, P. T. Barnum, the famous showman. The story is too much complicated to be given here in detail, but it seems that Barnum had become heavily interested in a smaller clock company, which was merged with the Jerome concern. The overvaluation of its stock, combined with mismanagement and speculation among the officials of the Jerome Company, served to drive the whole business into bankruptcy. Barnum lost heavily, and it took him years to clear up his obligations. Jerome never did recover from it; after some years of failing power in the employ of other manufacturers, he died in comparative poverty.

His long and eventful life spans the whole growth of the American clock business from the days of Eli Terry and his handsawed wooden movements down to the maturity of the modern business supplying, by factory methods and the use of specialized machinery, millions of clocks to all parts of the world. He had made clocks all over Connecticut, in Plymouth, Farmington, Bristol, New Haven and Waterbury, as well as in Massachusetts and, for a time, in South Carolina and Virginia. He had worked with his hands for Terry and Seth Thomas at the old wooden wheels and veneered cases, which were peddled about the country and sold for thirty or forty dollars each to be the treasured timekeepers of many households. And he had headed a modern factory, turning out dollar clocks by the tens of thousands.

It is said that a child in the first few years of its life lives briefly through the whole evolution of civilized mankind. That "infant industry," American clock-making, likewise, in the short space of fifty years passed through most of the steps of the whole growth of time-recording between the Middle Ages and our own era. This country stands now among the leading clock-making nations of the world; its product is famous in every land and a timepiece from Waterbury or New Haven may mark the minutes in the town from which Gerbert was banished for sorcery because he made a time-machine, or in that land between the rivers where the Babylonians first looked out upon the stars.

Most of the American clocks are still made in Connecticut; in fact, more than eighty per cent of the whole world's supply (excluding the German) comes from the Naugatuck Valley. The New Haven Clock Company, which is the successor of the Jerome Company, is to-day one of the largest. As far back as 1860, it was producing some two hundred thousand clocks a year. The Seth Thomas Company and others of the historic concerns are still at work in various portions of the state. And the Benedict & Burnham Company, with which, at one time, Chauncey Jerome was associated, became the Waterbury Clock Company, now regarded as the largest clock producer, and of which we shall hear more later on.

The key-note of the whole development was that new principle which American invention, prompted and stimulated by the pressing necessities of a new nation, brought into the business of time-recording – the principle of marvelously cheapening production-costs without loss of efficiency, through the systematic employment of machinery on a large scale.

As long as the inventive brains and the technical knowledge of the old-time craftsman found expression only through his own fingers, the results would be limited to his individual production, and the costs would be proportionately high. When, however, the master mind was able to operate through rows of machines, each under the supervision of a mechanic trained to its particular function, his inventive genius was provided with ten thousand hands and a hundred thousand fingers. Furthermore, the production gained in quality as well as in quantity, because of specialization, all the time its costs were in process of reduction. This, perhaps, has been America's chief contribution, not only to the making of timepieces, but, also to the world's industry in general.