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Clocks have been made in France for centuries. And we really need more than hours of presentation
to know a lot about French clocks. But the ones you most commonly will come across are
probably French marble clocks. You'll see black clocks made from the mid eighteen hundreds
into the early nineteen hundreds out of marble. If you want to have a good resource book on
those types of clocks, you can look at this book by Thorpe which tells how they were made.
Keep in mind those black marble clocks are really slate clocks and the stone was blackened
with a chemical process. This is a more exotic French marble clock that probably alabaster
and more figured and veined marble of the time. So those types of architectural cases
will be seen in French clocks as well. You can see this also has the open escapement
where you can see the clock actually working an ticking when it's operating. And certainly
the French were know for very ornate clocks, many of them under glass domes, many of them
with Ormalo finishes or fire guilding. Where it was a process of doing the type of gold
plating that gave you a very durable lustrous finish on the clock. This type of plating
isn't done anymore because it was extremely dangerous. You might here about mad hatters
who succumb to mercury poisoning. Mercury was an important part of this fire guilding
process, where you'd spread a paste of mercury and gold onto your clock case, heat it up,
drive off the mercury vapors, and end up with a beautiful gold finish. So many French clocks
are Ormalo, they're gold plated and there's a lot of Ormalo experts in France who died
prematurely to make these clocks as beautiful still as we find them.