Antique Clocks: Advertising Clocks

Video Transcript

"As you can imagine large wall clocks were a great way to advertise your product, whatever it might be. There was a particular company. The Baird Clock Company in New York State that produced these advertising clocks with many kinds of companies being advertised on them. In this case we're looking at the Jolly Tar past time. A type of tobacco. But you find these with all kinds of other products as well. And the people love to collect these. The problem with these is that this surface is liable to fracture and fall off and a lot of these are in restored condition but if they're not in restored condition they tend to look kind of ratty after the years have gone by. But this is just one example of an advertising clock. In fact in the previous clip you saw that we had another from Postal Telegraph which in a way was telling you which clock it was and advertising that it was a Postal Telegraph product as well. You also see store regulators. The kind that we saw previously that might be advertising somebodies jewelry store. They might be advertising other kinds of products so that you can see that in the old days before television and a lot of big display advertising in newspapers if you had a nice wall clock hanging in a prominent spot it was a good opportunity to have your company name advertised on something that people were going to look at all the time."