Wooden Clocks
The wooden clocks add beauty and elegance to the room. They blend and complement with other artifacts and furniture of the room. Wooden clocks come in varying designs and styles. Looking into the history of timekeeping in 1656 Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens devised a successful pendulum clock. He used short pendulum that beat several times a second and the whole works was encased in wood. Though this was an improvement on earlier mechanical clocks, it did have minute error of less than one minute a day. In 1670 an English clockmaker William Clement made use of a pendulum about a yard long that took a full second to move back and forth. He encased the pendulum in a wooden case to diminish the effects of air currents. This gave rise to Longcase clocks and pendulum. Again in the year 1721 George Graham improved the pendulum’s accuracy by compensating for changes in the pendulum’s length caused by temperature variations.
Railway house clock:
The basic form of the clock is rectangle or square piece on which an isosceles triangle is placed. The house-faced basic form with wooden decorative elements was developed to include scenes from daily life. The face of this wooden with white numbers and hands and fir cone shaped weights. Dancing couples in traditional clothes move to music or the mill wheel rotates on the hour, while a farmer chops wood. The cuckoo itself moves its wings and beak and rocks back and forth when calling. This is the oldest cuckoo clock from the black forest.
Puzzle Clock – A wooden beauty:
Puzzle Clock is made of Russian five-ply of Baltic Birch. The wood is laser cut. The pendulum of Puzzle Clock dates back to 300 years. The clock operates using the method” verge and foliot”. The top horizontal bar moves left and then right, is suspended by a thin cord. The pallet engages the escape wheel while the bar turns back and forth and the escape gear is turned in one-second intervals. The earlier versions had only an hour hand and were not very accurate. Later on the a Canadian clock maker named Joe Monincx made it extremely accurate by adding two escape wheels.
Digital wooden clocks:
The latest wooden digital clock appears to be a block of wood. This wooden clock has numerals that mysteriously appear on its surface, as if they were being projected. It works with a thin layer of wood over the numerals, so they can shine through. Until those numbers appear, it looks exactly like a Scandinavian-designed, well-sanded 10-inch-long block of teakwood. There are no buttons to be seen, no controls in sight—the time and alarm-set buttons are all hidden around back.
The antique clocks had wooden cases that were intricately carved and designed according to the style of the concerned period. Today manufacturers are trying their best to replicate the designs. Though they have succeeded, it can never equal the handcrafted cases of the early centuries.