Clock of Assumptions - Early Clocks

Forty years ago, I made an assumption. I assumed the clock would arrive from Frankfurt, Germany and gracefully take a place of prominence in my living room. I assumed it would be the granddaddy of all grandfathers, elegant, expensive, and the very symbol of our love forever.

In its place I got a military duffel bag filled with dirty rotted socks and underwear, a companion duffel bag filled with "unique" German empty beer bottles, and a tasteless wall-sized tapestry of a bull-fight.

The was the point in my life when I started learning the hard realities about making assumptions. At the time, I was a bride of six months and with the exception of a couple of weeks honeymoon, we had been separated by 5,265 miles, due to both of our obligations to the United States Air Force. I was stationed at Dyess AFB, in Abilene, Texas, whilst my husband was sent to Rhein-main Air Base, in Frankfurt, Germany.

Among the assumptions of the love-sick newly weds torn apart by fate (or in this case Uncle Sam), we had all the classic biggie assumptions about married life. We assumed we would be together forever. We assumed passion would consume us forever. We assumed we could conquer all obstacles, etc. etc. -- as soon as life would allow us to be truly together everyday.

Every day we wrote each other letters. We regularly sent each other love packages and pictures. We recorded our deepest thoughts and soon those recordings flew across the hot wild west of Texas to the coldness of Germany in winter.

By night, we both played "our song" released that year by Diana Ross and the Supremes, assuming every word was true "someday we'd be together."

It wasn't the big assumptions, however, that stopped all time when it came to the clock of our marriage. Our clock stopped over time with the many little romantic love assumptions on both our parts. Just like that imaginary clock, I hoped he'd bring home from Germany, most were not based in reality.

The coveted clock was a reasonable assumption. I'd written him about it many times when his friends on base returned from the same assignment, with grandfather clocks in tow. I wrote often about where I planned to put our own. He replied back, talking in great detail about the differences in clocks. As his TDY assignment (temporary duty assignment) neared an end -- he went on and on about the cuckoo clocks he'd bought our mothers, his aunt, and a family friend. So I assumed.

Whenever I asked about our grandfather clock, he'd hush me with:

"Jeri Baby, I can hardly wait for you to see what I bought for us. All the other guys didn't get the deal I did. No one is going to be able to believe their eyes when they come to visit."

Finally the day we were reunited came. To this day, the memory of tears and emotion of that first reunion still fill my eyes whenever I see a news clip of a soldier returning home. There we were on the landing strip, lost in youthful love and lust, amid the treasures of mutual assumptions.

I soon had a few revelations. He soon had a few revelations. He assumed I could cook. When he said buy us some wine to celebrate with our first meal, he didn't mean "Thunderbird." My hard earned belated first Christmas gift to him was a stereo from Sears, not the high tech turntable and speakers he had dreamed of. His disappointment was written all over him.

He thought I'd be overjoyed at his cleverness of just purchasing new underwear each time he needed some in Germany, rather than spend money on having the laundry done. I thought his duffel bag collection of beer bottles was for unique candle holders, not a symptom of his demon.

The clocks he'd bought for gifts for our family members were beautiful. I assumed ours wasn't among them, because we had to go pick it up, since it was a heavy grandfather's clock.

After a long night of saying hello in newlywed land, I awoke late the next morning to the sound of hammering.

"Don't come in here until I call you, Jeri Baby. I can't wait for you to see my present for you!"

There it was, his biggest assumption of all -- an ugly bullfight scene in reds, gold, and black -- big enough to cover the entire living room wall entirely. He was certain I would love it.

"Hmmmm. I was kinda hoping to put the grandfather clock on that wall. Where will we put it now?"

The clock of assumptions ticked loud and clear that day. It was only a prelude to all that we didn't know about love, marriage, what's important and what isn't.

The passage of time would, of course, reunite us, briefly in between overseas assignments. I had a daily reminder of what assumptions can do to a young marriage every time I watched the modern dime store clock he bought me when we made up. If that didn't make it real, living with the bullfight scene certainly gave me a lot of moments of thought.

I was a naive California girl who married a boy from one of the roughest neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. The differences between us had a lot to do with assumptions of what marriage really is, what love really is, who we both really were, and how time ticks away and has it's own voice and say in the outcome.

In the ten years we were married, we had two beautiful children. Unlike many of our peers we parted ways as friends who still loved each other, just couldn't live with each other. On the day we set each other free, we both cried wiping each other tears with a kitchen towel -- swearing the sentiments of another old Diana Ross and the Supremes song -- There ain't no mountain high enough. Unlike real clocks, we had no escapement mechanism. Funny what time and clocks of assumptions can do.

Just who made the first clock with wheels and weights we do not know for certain. Some say that the Chinese were the first, and the honor is also claimed for several Europeans.

Most students of the subject say that Gerbert, a monk, how later became Pope Sylvester II, made the first clock about the year 990 A.D.

At any rate, we know that there were clocks in many monasteries during the next hundred years.

We also know that a clock was placed in St. Paul's Cathedral in 1286. Another clock appeared in Paris in 1379, which continued to run for nearly five hundred years. It's the oldest clock whose complete story is known. The principle of the cog-wheels that ran it is the same as the ones we know today, though this clock had only one hand. It pointed only to the hours.

All of the early clocks used in monasteries struck the hour. In fact, the word clock comes from the French word cloche, which means a bell. Marking the hours was particularly important in monasteries, where a regular routine of devotion and work was set for the monks. The sound of the bell that told that it was time to change those occupations.

None of the early clocks kept very good time, but the workmanship improved as the years passed. Much attention was given to the ornament. Some of the clocks were beautiful, covered with elaborate carvings and many jewels.

The wheels in these clocks turned because the pull of a heavy weight, but it was difficult to make the weight descend evenly. When this difficulty was overcome, the regularity of the clock was greatly improved.

Two Inventions Greatly Improved Early Clocks

In 1581, an Italian youth, Galileo Galilei, who had been born in the same year as Shakespeare, saw a hanging lamp swinging in the cathedral at Pisa.

He noticed that whether the swing was long or short, it was always completed in the same amount of time.

This discovery of the movements of the pendulum had been known to the Babylonians, but it had been entirely forgotten.

However, it was not applied to the clock for nearly a hundred years after Galileo's discovery (approximately in 1665).

The second great invention that improved early clocks had to do with something called, escapement. It would make clocks complete.

One of the most important parts of clock making inventing was the various types of escapement drives that allowed for greater accuracy in keeping time. It is a key part of a good old fashioned clock. It's the "tick" or heartbeat of clocks.

There are about eleven types of clock escapement:

• Anchor escapement-- (ca 1660) This escapement had a wheel with pointed backward slanted teeth, along with an anchor that rocked from side to side attached to the pendulum.
• Co-axial escapement -- (ca 1980) A recent clock escapement which is a little complicated but allows for low friction movement.
• Cylinder escapement -- (ca 1700) Involved a constant contact wheel with the balance, very fragile.
• Deadbeat escapement -- (ca 1675) Improvement that pushed the escape wheel back and improved accuracy.
• Detent escapement -- (ca 1783) A common sea going escapement that was both fragile and not always reliable.
• Duplex escapement -- (ca 1782) A great improvement that allowed pocket watches to exist, as it only requires one or two swings per cycle in the balance wheel
• Electromechanical escapements -- (ca late 19th century) Use of the electromagnet
• Grasshopper escapement --
• Gravity escapement -- The pendulum is moved by two hinged arms that catches the escape.
• Lever escapement -- (ca 1800) Self starting escapement
• Verge escapement-- (ca 1275) The forerunner of the pendulum, controlled by a foliot horizontal bar with a weight attached to it

Many of these early clocks were furnished with figures which moved at regular times.

One example is found In a famous clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, the Three Wise Men bowed before a figure of the Virgin Mary, and a cock flapped his wings and crowed.

This ornate clock in the cathedral at Strasbourg, was built in 1838-42 by Schwilgue, replacing the original clock built by Tobias Stimmer in 1574. In several of the panels are figures that move - the procession below the clock face.

In a later clock, another example of fine and interesting clock manufacturing was a clock in which -- the quarter-hour was struck by the figure of an infant with a rattle, the half by a youth, the three-quarters by an old man, and the hour by a figure representing death.

The cuckoo clock from which a bird pops out and calls the hour is a modern type of this clock. There is something comforting about a cuckoo clock, in that it's one of the few things in life that has remained almost constant in its basic design and appeal.

Among the pendulum driven clocks, cuckoo clocks strike the hours using small bellows and pipes that are loosely supposed to be the same bird call as the common cuckoo bird. The clock also has a gong strike.

In existence since the mid-1600s, they originated in the Black Forest region of Germany