Rensselaer Republican, Volume 12, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 January 1880 — A Clock That Runs a Year on One Winding. [ARTICLE]

A Clock That Runs a Year on One Winding.

On Chatham street there lives an old, hoary-headed man named Cloff Pilquest, who is the inventor of a curious and somewhat wonderful piece of mechanism in the shape of a clock which faithfully ticks and tells the time for an entire year with only one winding. A Leader man found the aged artisan busily applying himself in his workshop yesterday afternoon, when the old gentleman, in broken English, related a short history of his life, of the curiosity in question, and explained the peculiarities of the time-piece. “I was born in 1802, in a place called Broley, in Sweden. I learned my trade with a workman named Persson, and during my apprenticeship, in the year 1820, I began to make drawings of my clock, and of these I made fully a dozen up to the time when I began its construction. In 1846 I came to this country and settled down in Pittsburgh, where I have lived and toiled ever since.” Here the old man took down a wellworn book, which proved to be nothing more nor less than a diary, containing the number of hoars ana sections of hoars and their exact position in the day, which he lavished on the 365 day time piece. After carefully examining his records, the hero resumed: “On the 18th of August of ’75 I began building the clock, and devoted ml my spare moments to its construction until the work was completed on the 28th of December of ’77, it is running just as it started on the 28th of December of last year.” Here the old man removed an ovalshaped glass case from the little object, and explained that the only advantages it possessed was simplicity and the faculty of pointing out the time of day through an entire year with bat one winding ap, and it acomplishes this feat in this way: Arranged in a semi-circle are eight powerful springs, each on

being wound np capable of keeping the internals in motion for precisely six weeks. These are encased in eight brazen bands, and through their center runs a shaft at each end of which revolves a wheel, and there is a communication between the wheel on the eight shafts. When one of these springs has become exhausted, the apparatus is so constructed that the next nearest spring intrusts its force to the one jnst weakened, and so on for all the eight. A glance through its works revealed that the construction was strikingly simple. Tbe ticking is hardly anywhere audible in the room, and the inventor bragged about the exactness with which his clock pointed out the hour of the day. Considering his time and the value of the material used in making the apparatus, he claims that this marvelous piece of mechanism has cost him, at the least calculation, $632.85. —Pittsburgh {Pa.) Leader.