Antique Clock Collecting: Chelsea Bell Clocks for Ships

Video Transcript

"Probably the best known Chelsea clocks are their ships bells clocks. They started making them early on, on in the history of the company, and to this day you can buy a brand new Chelsea ships bell clock. They're called that because they strike the marine or the naval method of announcing the hours on a bell. As opposed to a regular clock, where if it's eight o'clock it bongs eight times, nine o'clock bongs nine. This goes through the sequence of bells that you would hear on a ship, starting with one and going to eight over a four hour period. So I supposed if you're a retired sailor, you're just interest in marine things you can have the ships bell version of time keeping in your house. This particular model is a six inch model in a chrome case, or nickel case. Which is unusual, mostly they're polished brass, and much of the value of these clocks depends on the diameter of the case. The smallest ones which are about a third smaller than this, would be the most common and the least valuable, but still certainly worth hundreds of dollars. When you get up into the eight, ten, twelve inch cases, you really get into big dollars. One sold recently at an auction for over twenty thousand dollars, because it was made for Tiffany, it was a large one, and it had it's original chain. Which the clock hangs from. Just to give you a quick demonstration of the ships bells that we're going to hear, now screwing the bezel off many of these came in hinged bezels, which were more convenient. But a screw off bezel is the way you find a lot of them, so you just do a little bit more work when you're winding the clock every week. But at three o'clock we're going to hear six bells, we hope. Which will tell us at least part of the story of ships bells striking. Alright it's six bells, three o'clock."