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These little gems are called carriage clocks. They were portable time keepers, portable
time pieces again when most clocks were pendulum clocks this allowed you to take your clock
with you and as you are traveling . Often originally they came with leather boxes, leather
cases with a little front that you could even open it up and you could still see what time
it was while the *** was ticking away inside its leather case. These mostly were French
although I am going to show you a few that were American made later on but in mostly
French, mostly considerably more expensive than those alarm clocks we looked at and they
were sold in high end jewelry stores and often you will find in the name of the clock even
the name of the jeweler. In this case this is Shreve Crump and Lowe which is still a
major carriage trade jewelry store in Boston. These came in various levels of simplicity
or complication. The simplest would have been the rectangular case, just a time keeper.
You could go up from there with one that could do striking, they'll tell you the hours and
half hours as well as having an alarm feature. You see the little dial down in the bottom
indicates that this is an alarm clock as well. They even got fancier if you see ones with
the little button up top. That was called the repeater so that you could reach over
from your bed in the inn long before there was electric lighting and plug in or wind
up alarm clocks that were accurate enough, you would push the little button and the clock
would repeat the previous hour so as you were lying there you would know if it was sometime
between 12 and 1 or 1 and 2 in the morning. There were even more complicated ones called
Grand Sonary, or Petite Sonary that would tell you even basically what minute you were
in during that hour. Mostly they came in these rectangular cases but sometimes the case shapes
were different. This is a drum case which is rare and a little more interesting but
not as classic. The other issue with carriage clocks is whether the balance platform is
original. That is actually the thing up top ticking. We saw some ticking going on in another
clock and some of those parts are so fragile they get worn or broken and they are very
difficult to repair so that you can actually buy replacement platforms that have the escape
wheel and the balance wheel in there and you can put them in your old carriage clock to
make it a better time keeper, a better runner, but you make a sacrifice in value for having
a replacement major part inside your carriage clock.