8 minute read
A Courthouse Antique: Seth Thomas Clock
Seth Thomas Clock’s Four Faces Marking Time
What does the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Daviess County Courthouse in Gallatin have in common? Both have an original, hand-wound antique Seth Thomas clock. The antique tower clock atop the courthouse has helped keep Gallatin on time since 1909, a year after the courthouse was completed. The four faces of the clock still operate off its original weight and cable system. A similar Seth Thomas antique clock, housed in the Smithsonian Institution, has been electrified. So, even some of Daviess County’s ol’ timers aren’t aware of the uniqueness and value of their courthouse timepiece. It is one of the oldest working clocks of its type in the United States. Quite often, as it tolls the hour and half hour from its 1,200-pound brass bell, the sound can be heard four miles from town. To view the clock one has to climb 93 steps into the courthouse dome. The massive weights which power the mechanism are located below the huge brass bell. The clock itself, on an even higher level, is reached by a short flight of narrow steps. The clock was purchased by the Gallatin Commercial Club for $1,500 — a lot of money in those days. And the McShane all-brass bell Clock Keeper Buster Gordon [circa 1980] cost another $1,429.69. It measures 38 inches in diameter. Both were presented to the county on Jan. 2, 1909. All four faces of the clock are operated off the same mechanism. The weights which drive the mechanism weigh 2,250 pounds. Back in 1921, one of the cables broke and about half the weights plunged through two floors of the building. The following is an account of the incident, published in the April 21, 1921 edition of the Gallatin North Missourian entitled:
Crash at the Courthouse — Big 1600 Pound Clock Weight Breaks Loose and Plows Through Two Floors
"About 10 o’clock Tuesday floor. The crash made a terrifc been caught in its downward path. six-inch concrete third floor, big morning occupants of the court- noise, and the populace didn’t "The big weight is made up of enough for a person to go through. house thought a Bolshevik bomb know at the instant what had about two dozen smaller weights, "Two large 1600-pound weights had been turned loose, or the happened. Very fortunately, the these fitting into an iron slot operate the striking apparatus. furnace had blown up, when one of weight hung close to the corner, arrangement, and hooked to a wire The clock is keeping time just as if the big 1600-pound weights of the and no one was near on either floor. cable. It was the cable that gave nothing had happened. It will cost a courthouse dome clock broke loose, Had the mishap happened during a way. The weights did not separate right neat sum of money to repair crashed through the top and third session of court the odds are that until landing on the second floor. the building damage. It is mighty floors, and landed on the second two-to-one someone would have They made a clean cut hole in the lucky that no one was killed."
t seems that nothing stops the courthouse clock… as long as it’s properly wound. About the only repair to the I actual clock involves the striking mechanism, and occasionally replacing the wooden hands for the four exterior clock faces. Pigeons have always been a problem. They like to ride around on the wooden hands and there have been times — like when the clock reached 9:43 in the afternoon — they became stuck between the hands and had to be rescued. Such indignity for old Seth Thomas! A crank, similar to one used to crank a Model A Ford, is used to wind the clock — a weekly chore. Clock keepers in most decades include Buster Gordon, Bill Walker (who accompanied his father, Ted Walker, weekly to wind the clock) and Eric Corwin. Public access to the clockworks is somewhat limited. On the third floor of the courthouse, one must ascend a staircase, usually kept locked, to a fourth floor basically used as attic storage. The massive weights are encased here, and you can see the reinforcement railroad iron, concrete and wooden shaft built to guard against a repeat of the 1921 crash. Another narrow, steep flight of stairs leads to the solid brass McShane bell. The last leg of the journey (up into the dome with the clock) is by ladder.
A Scientist You Should Know...
Mervin Joe Kelly
The 1910 Valedictorian of Gallatin High School, the lab researcher who eventually became Chairman of the Board at Bell Laboratories
Few people have impacted the communications world we live in today more than this innovative giant, Mervin Kelly (1894-1971).
Mr. Kelly had great intelligence and great force. His work with R.A. Millikan at the University of Chicago gave him a lasting appreciation of the rarity and importance of first-rate scientists and firstrate research. He himself did creditable physical research. Later at the Western Electric Company and at Bell Laboratories (which was not formed until 1925), he did early and important work on vacuum tubes, including research, development, and manufacture. His group increased the life of telephone repeater (amplifier) tubes from 1,000 to 80,000 hours which by 1933 led to a transmitting tube for transatlantic telephony and broadcasting with an unprecedented power of 100,000 watts, and then later to a tube with a power of 250,000 watts.
Mr. Kelly was different. His fundamental belief was that an “institute of creative technology” like his own needed a “critical mass” of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas. But innovation required much more than that. Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.
One element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.
Another element of the approach was aspirational. Bell Labs was sometimes caricatured as an “ivory tower.” But it is more aptly described as an ivory tower with a factory downstairs. It was clear to the researchers and engineers there that the ultimate aim of their organization was to transform new knowledge into new things.
Still another method Mr. Kelly used to push ahead was organizational. He set up Bell Labs’ satellite facilities in the phone company’s manufacturing plants, so as to help transfer all these new ideas into things. But the exchange was supposed to go both ways, with the engineers learning from the plant workers, too. As manufacturing increasingly moved out of the United States during the last half of the 20th Century, it likewise took with it a whole ecosystem of industrial knowledge. But in the past, this knowledge tended to push Bell Labs – and this country – toward new innovations.
To many, Mervin Kelly’s name does not ring a bell. Born at Princeton, MO, Kelly’s family operated a hardware and farm implement business in Gallatin, MO, where he received his grade and high school education. Kelly graduated as class valedictorian at the age of 16. He studied to become a physicist at the University of Chicago, going on to join the research corps at AT&T. Between 1925 and 1959, Mervin Kelly was employed at Bell Labs, rising from researcher to Chairman of the Board. In 1950, he traveled around Europe, delivering a presentation that explained to audiences how his laboratory worked.
Kelly’s greatest contribution lay in creative technical management. It is no more than just to say that Kelly made Bell Laboratories the foremost industrial laboratory in the world.
A visionary firebrand, Kelly directed vacuum-tube R&D at the labs
SOURCES: “True Innovation” by Jon Gertner, published Feb. 25, 2012 in the New York Times Mervin Joe Kelly 1894-1971, A Biographical Memoir by John R. Pierce, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (Copyright 1975)
Kelly was always and forever pushing the operating management, and the heads of AT&T as well, to get on with new things. Twice he submitted his resignation to the president of AT&T, stating that important work at Bell Laboratories was not being adequately funded. In each case, he got the funds.
