Clock Brands - Telechron (Paperback)

Purchase includes free access to book updates online and a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Telechron is the name of a US company that manufactured electric clocks between 1912 and 1992. "Telechron" is derived from the Greek words tele, meaning "far off," and chronos, "time," thus referring to the transmission of time over long distances. The idea behind Telechron clocks was, indeed, to tie time-keeping to the transmission of electricity over power-grids. Telechron had its heyday between 1925 and 1955, when it sold millions of electric clocks to American consumers. Henry Warren established the company in 1912 in Ashland, Massachusetts. Initially, it was called "The Warren Clock Company," producing battery-powered clocks. These proved unreliable, however, since batteries weakened quickly, which resulted in inaccurate time-keeping. Warren saw electric motors as the solution to this problem. In 1915, he invented a self-starting synchronous motor consisting of a rotor and a coil, which was patented in 1918. A synchronous motor spins at the same rate as the cycle of the alternating current driving it. Synchronous electric clocks had been available previously, but had to be started manually. In later years, Telechron would advertise its clocks as "bringing true time," because power plants kept the frequency of the alternating current perfectly constant at 60 Hz. But such constancy did not yet exist when Warren first experimented with his synchronous motors. Irregularities in the frequency of the alternating current led not only to inaccurate time-keeping but, more seriously, to incompatible power-grids in the US, as power could not readily be transferred from one grid to another. In order to overcome these problems, Warren invented a "master clock," which he installed at the Boston Edison Company in 1916. This clock had two movements, o... More: http://booksllc.net/?id=17414542