Antique Clock Collecting: German Anniversary Clocks

Video Transcript

"When talking about German clocks, we could have talked about anniversary clocks or four hundred day clocks, but they really deserve their own section here, to discuss. This is the typical style with the four balls that rotate slowly back and forth. Millions of these were made in Germany, millions probably came back as souvenirs with tourists, or with GI's after world war two. But, because there were so many of them, these really have no collector value, their fun to watch, I occasionally repair them for people for sentimental reasons, but their not a clock that serious clock collectors would collect. The exception to that are the very earliest ones. There's an example of that here, which instead of the four balls, has a disk pendulum, so we call these disk pendulum four hundred day clocks. Obviously the four ball method was probably more attractive, but early on, this was the way that they arranged the pendulum to look and to oscillate with adjustments on it for slow, fast. These are called anniversary or four hundred day clocks because at least theoretically they only need winding once a year, and they do this by metering out that power very slowly. If you think about a regular pendulum clock, that pendulum is ticking very fast, running down that spring or weight within a day, or a week. If you slow down the pendulum oscillation somehow, you're going to stretch out the period in which the main spring can unwind without having to be rewound. In this case, the pendulum hangs on a torsion spring, a very thin wire and this pendulum disk only goes back and forth about eight times a minute, as opposed to a hundred or more, in most pendulum clocks. So, we're metering out that power very slowly, enabling this to run for months, or perhaps even a year on a single winding. Not particularly accurate, they can wander around in time, very fussy, they're hard to make run accurately or consistently unless they're on a very firm surface. But, they're fun to watch, if you just want a quality German timepiece, it's interesting to watch. Here is this, if you want one of collector quality, look for a disk pendulum version."