Antique Clock Collecting: Telechron Electric Clocks

Video Transcript

"There's some other early electric clocks which more and more now people are beginning to appreciate especially since plug in clocks pretty much are a thing of the past now with battery clocks taking their place. Telechron is really the company that perfected plug in clocks. Before that you had the problem with power interruptions. Your clock wouldn't restart or it would start again and you didn't know that there'd been a power interruption and it would be saying the wrong time. The Warren Telechron Company coordinated with the power companies to make sure that we were getting a 60 cycle power. And as long as 60 cycle power came through the lines your clock was going to be accurate because it was geared to turn to convert that 60 cycle power into accurate time keeping in an electric clock. There's early ones in beautiful wooden cases. So they're attractive to look at. Often if you're unsure about whether the Telechron electric motor in there is any good or if it has stopped working these can be converted to battery. You don't have to worry about the chord but you can still enjoy the aesthetics of them. We have again a book by Jim Linds on these Telechron clocks. Telechron later became part of GE but there were thousands of styles and he's assigned contemporary collecting baggage to them as well. So this gives you a guide at least of which ones are rare and which ones are more common. The final thing to note and some of you may remember in the past too, that these Telechron clocks always had a little porthole in the dial which would show red if the power had been interrupted. The clock would restart but at least you know that the power was off for a minute or 5 hours and you would no longer trust the time that the clock shows. As soon as you reset the clock that red dot goes away until the next time the power goes off."