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Passion
Everyone has passion for something. The lucky people have passions for many things.
One should have passion for the one they are with, for their family, and their friends.
Some people are also passionate about their religion, their car, their football team,
and their pets. The truly lucky people are also passionate about the things they have
acquired. I am passionate about all of the things I mentioned but I am especially
passionate about things mechanical, but most of all, I am passionate about time,
and the devices that help us monitor time. Time has been controlling our actions
for thousands and thousands of years but until a few hundred years ago, we monitored
time by the shadow of a tree or the flow of water leaking from a vessel.
Then man discovered clocks.
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Water Clock
This hand tooled water clock made in Birmingham, England and dated 1551.
At high noon, the clock maker could fill the float water canister until the hand pointed
to the sun. The following day, the hand should once again point up to the sun. If it
did not, the clock maker would adjust the valve until the water drip rate caused the
clock to indicate the correct time each day.
The deep tooling on the water tank reminds you of the metal work you would see on an
old wine goblet from the same period. The tooling is raised almost a quarter inch in
some spots and the work is beautiful.
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Interesting Bosses
Time is our boss and by creating interesting, fascinating, or beautiful clocks, time
our boss, becomes a little easier to deal with. The Conger Street Clock Museum is
actually a museum about time as much as it is about clocks. In fact there are many
items in the museum that are not clocks at all but they do represent time in its
most interesting form and everything in the museum is basically mechanical.
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