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As I mentioned, not everybody could afford a clock, actually, only Kings and Nobility
and then eventually rich people but most people knew what time it was from public clocks.
It was a sign of prestige in Europe and then in America, if your town had a public clock
and eventually you got to where there were many public clocks in the town often dueling
bells, where the church's and the town halls were fighting over who had the correct time,
which often had to be established by the use of a sundial, oddly enough. But public time
keeping was how most people knew what time it was. This is a church near me, in North
Andover Massachusetts, I'm talking to you from Andover Mass. now, but this is, again,
is the way the people of North Andover, back in the seventeen and even eighteen hundreds
until they could afford their own clocks, that's how they knew what time it was. Of
course, this always had a bell on the steeple as well because, unless you were near by this
church, you couldn't read the time on the face, you had to listen for the bells and
know what time it was. Of course, the bells always rang when the Indians were coming or
when it was time for a wedding, or a funeral, or church service but, ordinarily, if they
rang out the hours, then you would know what time it was. Something that clock collectors
often try to have at least one set of are actual hands from a tower clock. As you can
see in the picture, the hands are still there so I didn't steal it off my neighboring church
but this supposedly was off a church somewhere in Maine but it was being sold by an antique
dealer. We'll talk about condition, of course, later on but this is really the way you want
to see something like this. This is copper that originally was guilded. You can see little
specks of gold on here but nobody has repainted this and it's sort of in the nice original
condition that it came from. I have a pair of these hanging on the wall in my house and
they're lots of fun to own. You also see that there's another pole coming out the end here,
which actually is a counter weight because if this hand were just attached here, it would
be so heavy that the clock couldn't move it around in the big dial, like you see here,
so you need it counter weighted and it worked, unless, perhaps, you had a pigeon sitting
on the end and that sometimes was enough to stop the clock.