Pendule à grande sonnerie Armand Couaillet

A carriage clock is a small, spring-driven

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 t ...

, designed for travelling, developed in the early 19th century in

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

, where they were also known as "Officers' Clocks". The first carriage clock was invented by

Abraham-Louis Breguet Abraham-Louis Breguet (10 January 1747 – 17 September 1823), born in Neuchâtel, then a Prussian principality, was a horologist who made many innovations in the course of a career in watchmaking industry. He was the founder of the Bregue ...

for the

Emperor Napoleon Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader who ...

in 1812. The case, usually plain or gilt-brass, is

rectangular In Euclidean plane geometry, a rectangle is a quadrilateral with four right angles. It can also be defined as: an equiangular quadrilateral, since equiangular means that all of its angles are equal (360°/4 = 90°); or a parallelogram containin ...

with a carrying

handle A handle is a part of, or attachment to, an object that allows it to be grasped and manipulated by hand. The design of each type of handle involves substantial ergonomic issues, even where these are dealt with intuitively or by following tr ...

and often set with

glass Glass is a non-crystalline, often transparent, amorphous solid that has widespread practical, technological, and decorative use in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optics. Glass is most often formed by rapid cooling ( quenching ...

or more rarely enamel or

porcelain Porcelain () is a ceramic material made by heating substances, generally including materials such as kaolinite, in a kiln to temperatures between . The strength and translucence of porcelain, relative to other types of pottery, arises main ...

panels. A feature of carriage clocks is the ''platform escapement'', sometimes visible through a glazed aperture on the top of the case. Carriage clocks use a balance and

balance spring A balance spring, or hairspring, is a spring attached to the balance wheel in mechanical timepieces. It causes the balance wheel to oscillate with a resonant frequency when the timepiece is running, which controls the speed at which the wheels of ...

for timekeeping and replaced the larger pendulum

bracket clock A bracket clock is a style of antique portable table clock made in the 17th and 18th centuries. The term originated with small weight-driven pendulum clocks (sometimes called 'true bracket clocks') that had to be mounted on a bracket on the wall ...

. The factory of Armand Couaillet, in Saint-Nicolas d'Aliermont (France) made thousands of carriage clocks between 1880 and 1920. A carriage clock has in the past been a traditional gift from employers to retiring or long-serving staff. However, in modern times, with changing work patterns and changing desires, this is much less the case.

Sources and references

*Charles Allix and Peter Bonnert, ''Carriage Clocks. Their history and development'', Antique Collector's club, 1974 *Emmanuelle Cournarie, ''La mécanique du geste, trois siècles d'histoire horlogère à Saint-Nicolas d'Aliermont'', Édition PTC-Les Falaises, 2011 (French) *Lolita Delesque and Marianne Lombardi, ''Armand Couaillet, horloger et inventeur de génie'', Musée de l'horlogerie, juin 2013, 44p (French)

External links

Antiques Clock designs {{Tech-stub