The list is by no means complete. There was John Ellicott, who was born
at Bodmin, and another Cornishman from the same town is John Arnold,
who was apprenticed to his father, a watchmaker there. Arnold continued
what Harrison had begun in the chronometer. We must not exclude the
great Dr. Hooke, who was born at Freshwater, Isle of Wight, who
invented the anchor escapement for clocks and contested the invention
of the balance spring in watches with Huygens.
=Names of Clockmakers found on Clocks in the Provinces.=--It has
been suggested that in some cases the name of a local maker does not
necessarily determine, when found on the dial or elsewhere, that such
clock has been made by the person whose name it bears. It has also been
advanced that the name of the owner was sometimes put on the dial.
This last theory can be dismissed as being of so infrequent use as
to be practically negligible in recording lists of makers. The other
conjecture may possibly have sufficient truth in it to disconcert
collectors of examples of local crafts. Of course, it is a statement
that cannot be proved, nor can it be disproved. Presumably a clockmaker
in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when clockmaking was
something more than selling or mending clocks that other people made,
did not deliberately set up business and, in a small town where secrecy
was impossible, make a practice of putting his name on work he did not
execute. That he did not make all the parts himself is admitted. Had
he done so, he would have had to be a chain-maker or a catgut-maker, a
pulley-maker, a chaser of metal for his dials, a cabinet-maker for his
cases, and so on down to his most minute screws. One might as well take
similar objection to Sir Joshua Reynolds or Gainsborough that they did
not extract their pigments from the natural vegetables or minerals,
that they neglected to become proficient in manipulating hogs'
bristles or camel-hair into brushes, or that they could not and did not
make their own canvases or carve their own frames.
It did happen that an old clock by one maker was sent to another for
repair, and he made such extensive repairs to the movement that he
felt himself justified in putting his own name to the clock in its new
state. The owner would have had something to say to this interchange
of names had there not been some justification for it. This practice,
however, is not confined to the provinces, and we cannot charge the
provincial maker with being wholly unscrupulous.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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