The Childrens Museum of Indianapolis - Kit Cat Klock and box

The Kit-Cat Klock is an

art deco Art Deco, short for the French ''Arts Décoratifs'', and sometimes just called Deco, is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design, that first appeared in France in the 1910s (just before World War I), and flourished in the Unite ...

novelty Novelty (derived from Latin word ''novus'' for "new") is the quality of being new, or following from that, of being striking, original or unusual. Novelty may be the shared experience of a new cultural phenomenon or the subjective perception of an ...

wall

clock A clock or a timepiece is a device used to measure and indicate time. The clock is one of the oldest human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month and the ...

shaped like a grinning cat with cartoon eyes that swivel in time with its

pendulum A pendulum is a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely. When a pendulum is displaced sideways from its resting, equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the ...

tail. It is traditionally black, but models in other colors and styles are available. It is an iconic symbol of kitchens in

pop culture Pop or POP may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Music * Pop music, a musical genre Artists * POP, a Japanese idol group now known as Gang Parade * Pop!, a UK pop group * Pop! featuring Angie Hart, an Australian band Albums * Pop (Gas al ...

. The first clock was an idea Earl Arnault (1904 – 1971) and then created and physically prototyped by Clifford Stone (1908-1986) in 1932 and made by the Allied Manufacturing Company, which was owned by Stone, in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, Portland is the county seat of Multnomah County, the most populous co ...

. Allied subsequently moved to

Seattle Seattle ( ) is a seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the seat of King County, Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in both the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest regio ...

Washington Washington commonly refers to: * Washington (state), United States * Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States ** A metonym for the federal government of the United States ** Washington metropolitan area, the metropolitan area centered on ...

, in the early 1940s and then to southern California in 1962, whereupon it was renamed California Clock Company. The clock's design has changed little in the intervening years, with the first generation, manufactured from the 1930s–early 1950s having two paws and no bow tie, and newer models having four paws and a bow tie. In the 1960s genuine crystals were added as accents to some clocks. The words "Kit-Cat" were added to the clock's face in 1982. The original clocks were AC-powered, but due to scarcity of American-made AC motors, the clock was redesigned for battery power in the late 1980s. The manufacturer estimates that an average of one clock has been sold every three minutes for the last 50 years. Kit-Cat Klocks are frequently seen in movies, commercials, TV and advertising. Several other animated clocks made by the California Clock Company, an owl and a poodle, are shown next to Kit-Cat in this sequence. The name "Kit-Cat" is a trademark of California Clock Company.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Kit-Cat Klock vendor's site

Kit-Cat Klock Canadian redistributor

Kit-Cat Klock UK redistributor
Clock designs Art Deco Products introduced in 1932 Cats in popular culture Novelty items

See also

References

External links