New range of 24 hour watches

Those nice people at the AAA Watch Club have introduced new models in their popular 24 hour watch range. These now feature luminous numerals, and you can also have them with high quality leather straps as well as stainless steel straps.

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Plus, there are now gents and ladies models, and you can get them with white dials too. Accuracy is as expected from a good quality quartz movement – mine has yet to lose a whole second since I started timing it last week. The high contrast display is working fine in this gloomy English winter, although luminous dots for the odd-numbered hours would be even better.

Time over the wires

This combined galvanometer and 24 hour clock was in the window of a shop called Hancocks, somewhere in London in the early 20th century.

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It was one of many clocks that were electrically connected to London’s Greenwich Observatory. This service started in the 1850s, when Greenwich time was first provided to interested subscribers – the watchmakers, government offices, and railway operators who needed to know the exact time. In 1873, the cost of connecting your apparatus to the nearest Post Office’s time server was £12 a year.

I suppose the needle would have deflected at the start of each hour. More ingenious solutions were tried to indicate the exact moment: most popular was a ball on a pole, that descended at the start of the new hour.

Sometimes, though, nothing can beat a personal service. This picture shows Ruth Belville, the Greenwich Time Lady. Her job was to set her accurate pocket watch at the main Greenwich Observatory 24 hour clock on a Monday morning, get a signed certificate from an official, and then walk around London visiting forty or fifty chronometer makers, who would then transfer the right time to their own most reliable timekeeper. She carried on doing this job from 1892 to the 1930s.

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This morning, my computer asked one of Apple’s computers on the other side of the world for the right time, using the Network Time Protocol to set its clock, taking less than a few seconds to do it. Just some of the everyday magic that we take for granted today.

To qualify, just make one of these

If you wanted to qualify as a master clockmaker in 17th century Augsburg (Germany), your final assignment was to make a clock with the following specifications:

A clock which shows the time both in the great and small clock ie the 24 hour and 12 hour system. It should show the times of sunrise and sunset and also show the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac throughout the year. It should strike the quarter hours and the full hours in both 1-12 and 1-24 hour systems.

You would be given about six months to make one and submit it to the examiners, the guild masters. If it was good enough, you became a master clockmaker. The examiners would be expecting something like this, perhaps:

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This example of a masterpiece clock organizes its myriad features around a hexagonal framework. On two faces there are main dials showing the time in the ‘Great’ (24 hour) system. On a face not visible here, there are hands showing the age and phase of the moon, and an astrolabe with sky map. The large dial shown here has five sets of numbers, and a moving sunrise/sunset/daylight indicator formed by two light and dark moving discs. Another hour hand shows either Nuremberg hours (where counting started at sunset) or Bohemian hours (where counting started at sunrise). And around the outside you can tell the time in both the Great and Small systems.

Other dials show the day of the week, and control the bell-ringing. There’s a switch to choose 24 hour or 12 hour striking, so that 13 o’clock can be indicated either by 1 or 13 chimes. And on the right dial below there’s a read-out of the current state of the count wheels for the chiming – notice how the gaps between the numbers are proportional to them, with wider gaps for the large numbers. This is the clockmaker’s ingenious solution to the task of keeping count of how many chimes to make.

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This clock’s intriguing because it provides for a number of different and conflicting time standards, even at the risk of increasing its complexity. To some extent this might be because the clock is an academic exercise, rather than a cost-effective market-ready offering, but it suggests that both Nuremberg and Bohemian hours were still in use around 1650.

I hope the maker of this example qualified!

You can see this clock in the British Museum, London. It also appears in a new book, Clocks, by David Thompson, published in 2004 by the British Museum Press. The book describes some of the treasures in the Museum’s clocks department, with many fine photographs by Saul Peckham.

Radical designs

Here’s an amazing new look 24 hour analog watch, designed by Kent Parks at Everest Watches.

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The daylight hours are at the right side of the dial, and the nighttime hours are on the left side. It all glows in the dark, too!

I saw this on the WatchUSeek 24 hour watch forum. This is a great place to meet 24 hour watch enthusiasts and experts, and talk about 24 hour watches.

Another reason to show this watch here is that it illustrates the difference between the 24 hour dial and the 24 hour time format. The 24 hour dial shows all the hours of a day at once; the 24 hour time format (known outside the US as ISO 8601) uses the numbers 13 to 23 for afternoon and evening hours rather than AM and PM suffixes. This watch, like so many 24 hour clocks and watches from earlier centuries, uses a double-12 numbering system rather than the 24 hour time format.

Mystery clock

I spotted this strange clock recently, and I thought it would be fun to make it a mystery picture. Where can you see this clock? (Sorry about the quality.)

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No prizes for guessing the answer, except the satisfaction of being a clock wizard!