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Lot Essay
ALBERT ODMARK NOTES
Purchased May 24, 1963 from J.L. Williams, Kingston, England.
The verge escapement is a noisy escapement so when the fashion for night clocks came in efforts were made to render them less noisy. A grand sonnerie clock by Tompion was given by Charles II to his mistress Barbera Villiers, Duchess of Grafton. Tompion had replaced the leading edge of the verge pallets with a small string of gut thereby silencing the verge. This clock was made just after the invention of the rack and snail strike and would have been one of the very first clocks to have had a strike/silent facility enabling the strike to be shut off at night. The movement was taken out of the case by Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy and presented to the Society of Civil Engineers. George Graham devised a very pretty arrangement wherein three triangularly set rollers are impulsed by two gut cords fixed to either side of a stirrup. Another that Knibb may have devised has pallets made of weak springs adjusted by a depthing screw.
The present clock's silent escapement has gut lines along Tompion's system. Vulliamy used silent pallets on a number of table clocks of this design.
Purchased May 24, 1963 from J.L. Williams, Kingston, England.
The verge escapement is a noisy escapement so when the fashion for night clocks came in efforts were made to render them less noisy. A grand sonnerie clock by Tompion was given by Charles II to his mistress Barbera Villiers, Duchess of Grafton. Tompion had replaced the leading edge of the verge pallets with a small string of gut thereby silencing the verge. This clock was made just after the invention of the rack and snail strike and would have been one of the very first clocks to have had a strike/silent facility enabling the strike to be shut off at night. The movement was taken out of the case by Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy and presented to the Society of Civil Engineers. George Graham devised a very pretty arrangement wherein three triangularly set rollers are impulsed by two gut cords fixed to either side of a stirrup. Another that Knibb may have devised has pallets made of weak springs adjusted by a depthing screw.
The present clock's silent escapement has gut lines along Tompion's system. Vulliamy used silent pallets on a number of table clocks of this design.