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A Victorian mahogany and brass-bound eight day astronomical longcase regulator with seven-legged gravity escapement and showing mean and sidereal time

T. COOKE & SONS, YORK AND LONDON. 19TH CENTURY

Details

A Victorian mahogany and brass-bound eight day astronomical longcase regulator with seven-legged gravity escapement and showing mean and sidereal time
T. Cooke & Sons, York and London. 19th Century
The case with substantial backboard and with fully glazed hinged and detachable upper section, above plinth panelled to all sides and with drop-down front door, with silvered sight ring to silvered and engraved 13 in. diameter regulator format dial, signed T. Cooke & Sons York & London, with subsidiary seconds ring above 24-hour sidereal time ring with hour hand and XII-hour mean time ring with hour and minute hand, the centre sweep hand indicating sidereal minutes, all hands of blued steel, winding through a brass-covered aperture in the glass to a winding square at the centre of the sidereal ring, the movement with tapering plates secured to a brass bracket, high count train, rare seven-legged gravity escapement, great wheel with double-click work and maintaining power, the backboard centred by a brass-mounted silvered and engraved combination thermometer and aneroid barometer dial, signed T. Cooke & Sons/Patent 31. Southampton St./STRAND./LONDON/202/Compensated, the weight supported by a conical bracket and with pulleys to top and bottom, the pendulum beating sidereal seconds and swinging against a silvered scale on the backboard, with steel rod and brass jacket engraved SOLAR PHYSICS/35, mounted above with a Vernier scale for precise measurement of its height; crank key, case key
76½ in. (194 cm.) high

Provenance

The Norman Lockyer Observatory Corporation, The Hill Observatory, Salcombe Regis, Sidmouth Devon.

Literature

Illustrated, Derek Roberts, English Precision Pendulum Clocks, Schiffer, pp.137-139, figs.18-22a-h.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Born in 1807, Thomas Cooke was largely self-educated and initially pursued a career as a teacher. At the same time he began making his own optical and scientific instruments and in 1836 he set up in business at 50 Stonegate Street in York with the aid of a £100 loan from his wife's uncle. In 1841 he moved to premises 12 Coney Street as his business grew, fuelled in part by the increased demand for surveying instruments caused by the growth of the railway network. In 1852 he set up his own turret clock business. In 1851 Cooke was elected a member of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, for whose observatory he had provided a clockwork-powered telescope the previous year. By 1860 he had acquired an international reputation for his instruments and was even selling complete observatories. He ran a nautical instrument shop in Hull and in 1861 opened a shop at 31 Southampton Street, London. In 1862 at the London Exhibition Cooke received an order for a 25 in. telescope (then the largest in the world) that was to prove the company's undoing. He underestimated the cost and it was uncompleted when he died in 1868, finally being finished in 1871. The company went bankrupt in 1879 and although his sons continued in the business they did not own it.
For further details see Derek Roberts (op.cit). Roberts further comments that the present clock has the only seven-legged gravity escapement he has seen.
A small longcase regulator by Thomas Cooke was sold these rooms 7 December 2005, lot 106.

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