An immense clock, 13 feet tall, towers over visitors to the American Democracy exhibition in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. More striking than its size, though, are its decorations: a profusion of patriotic icons, gilded carvings, painted landscapes, and mechanically animated scenes from U.S. history. Our research has revealed not just where the clock has been, but the changing, layered interpretations it has acquired since it was made around 1890. The Great Historical Clock of America is worth a closer look—as are its handlers, owners, and global audiences.
Before delving into the clock’s history, it’s helpful to take a tour of its physical details. Close inspection reveals exuberant animated figures, patriotic motifs, astronomical designs, and painted landscapes. Behind-the-scenes clockwork animates vignettes in a progression of mechanized history, some of which are pictured here.
The video below gives viewers an overview of The Great Historical Clock of America. Footage of the clock's automatons in motion are accompanied by the sounds of their internal mechanisms and a tinkling music box.
This profusion of patriotic instruction reminds us of a period in U.S. history when, with the trauma of the Civil War still fresh and a tidal wave of immigration shifting the country’s ethnic makeup, many white Northerners promoted a collective story to cement a common national identity. The clock, crafted in New England, offered spectators lively vignettes of Columbus, Pocahontas, William Penn with unnamed Native Americans, George Washington, and the marching minutemen of the Revolutionary War. Fulton’s steamboat pointed to American technical prowess, Niagara Falls its natural wonders. The clock’s creators juxtaposed these origin stories—staples from U.S. antebellum classroom textbooks—with more recent tributes of the nation’s shared experiences, the Gettysburg Monument and the Statue of Liberty.
Beyond the representative imagery on the clock, its execution is worth considering. The clock’s moving dioramas are roughly made, but there are finely painted landscapes on its back side (the locations depicted and artists still to be identified). A small unsigned internal brass clockwork drives the animated scenes, and a tiny Swiss-made music box plays eight different tunes, also still unidentified. In the clock’s heyday, audience members were treated to a complex performance to enchant the senses—mechanical sights and sounds and a lively human explainer or, “delineator.” In the tradition of such traveling automatons, the machinery of the clock was hidden, the mechanical ingenuity of the maker implied, and the audience invited to appreciate the maker’s skill through the complexity of movements.
There are still many unknowns to uncover, but thanks to years of research, we can now sketch the main stages in the life history of The Great Historical Clock of America. The broad outlines of that life include its creation, worldwide travel, private ownership, and acquisition by the Smithsonian.
Over the course of three years beginning around 1890, a New England artist, Charles S. Chase, led a team to create the clock under a commission from Roscoe Green Bachelder. Bachelder had worked with Chase before, and both had started careers decades earlier with international traveling shows that featured mechanical marvels and live performers.
When our museum acquired the clock, the only clue to its origins was a tiny envelope, four by two and a half inches, found in one of the clock’s nine custom travel crates. Through research in newspapers from the period, we know the clock toured from the East Coast of the United States to Australia, New Zealand, Honolulu, Seattle, and then back to Boston. Bachelder and Albert Chase, son of Charles, managed the tour. It was during these travels, thanks to newspaper coverage, that the piece acquired the grand name: The Great Historical Clock of America.
Traveling shows of the period might team up a mechanical theater like our giant clock with panoramas, ventriloquist acts, comedians, and musical performances—including minstrel shows where both white performers in blackface and African American performers appeared on stage. By that time, the Pacific circuit was supported with regular steam ship routes, a well-traveled commercial pathway that also established and extended larger national colonial and imperial goals. When The Great Historical Clock of America toured in 1893 and 1894, its type of live commercial entertainment still drew crowds, but it was already becoming an anachronism. Recorded sound and moving pictures were swiftly growing in popularity in more permanent and sophisticated well-supported venues, especially the Columbian World’s Fair in Chicago that dates from the same time.
In the next stages of its life, The Great Historical Clock of America ended its travels and appeared in more fixed venues. When it returned to the Boston area in 1894, the clock spent the last days of its official tour at Austin & Stone’s Museum, a self-described Barnumesque collection of “Freaks, Curiosities, Illusions, Mechanical Novelties, Marvels, Wax Figures, and Museum Attractions of every kind.” In the decades thereafter it ended up in the hands of a series of private owners. This is when the categorization of the object as a clock was cemented, overshadowing its nature as traveling automaton entertainment. It resurfaced on display in a clock museum in Bristol, Connecticut, and came to the Smithsonian in 1979.
We’ve continued to interpret the giant artifact in different ways in different exhibitions ever since. We’ve shown it as an American curio, as a homegrown version of internationally intriguing automatons, and, in a current exhibition about democracy, as an illustration of Americans' changing attitudes towards history, citizenship, and national symbols. Now no longer in the company of other clocks or framed by the subject of timekeeping, this artifact serves as a potent reminder of its creators' original intent. With automated stories and familiar symbols, those creators hoped to craft a shared national identity in a divisive period in U.S. history. Over its lifetime, the clock's meaning changed with every new venue. Who knows what comes next?
Carlene Stephens is a curator in the Division of Work and Industry. Her responsibilities include caring for the collections pertaining to timekeepers and automatons.
This article is adapted from Stephens’s recent article in the journal Nineteenth-Century Contexts. For additional research on the Great Historical Clock of America, she recommends her and Michael O’Malley’s article in the Bulletin of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors. She also suggests that readers intrigued by the monumental clock look at the oldest automaton in the Smithsonian’s collections, made in the figure of a friar from the 1500s. Lastly, she thinks the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian’s video, What’s the Story with National Stories?, would be a wonderful companion to any classroom discussion of the Great Historical Clock of America.
