Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects! where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the exhibits team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today I’m speaking with Richard Ketchen, a horologist, or artisan who makes and repairs clocks. In addition to his own private business, tending to the clocks of a wide range of customers, he maintains our own collection at Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. Richard, however, is as much an historian of horology as he as a practitioner. So, I wanted to ask him about the history of the craft, the evolution of clock technology over time, and how the art of timekeeping influenced our own history. Here he is. Richard Ketchen, welcome to the show.
Richard Ketchen 01:17
Thank you. Pleasure to be here.
Jennifer Berglund 01:26
Can you describe the room that you’re in right now, because it’s just so fabulous.
Richard Ketchen 01:32
The room is in the basement of my house, so the commute is very easy. It’s basically a small machine shop that’s totally devoted to repairing antique clocks. I have a small milling machine and a fairly good sized lathe, and I have some other lathes that are very, very small, and I use them all. There’s a lot of clocks hanging on the walls, some of which are mine that I’ve acquired over the years. A couple of them are clocks that I’ve made. Some of them are customers’ clocks that I’m in the process of repairing, and lots of toolboxes and lots of tools.
Jennifer Berglund 02:05
And lots of ticking and tocking.
Richard Ketchen 02:07
Yes.
Jennifer Berglund 02:07
Which is just such a lovely sound. So tell me, there’s a word for your profession. What is that and describe what it means.
Richard Ketchen 02:15
It’s called horology. Some people would say I am an horologist. I think this is where the word ‘hour’ came from, hora, and clocks in general, H-O-R-O-L-O-G-Y.
Jennifer Berglund 02:27
Horology. It’s just not a word you hear every day.
Richard Ketchen 02:30
No, it isn’t. I have a lot of books on the subject, and I have a very old book with a very tattered binding on it, and in great big letters, it says “modern horology”. Maybe people should not use the word modern when they’re making something that’s going to last for a long time.
Jennifer Berglund 02:46
So how did you become interested in working with clocks?
Richard Ketchen 02:50
When I got out of the Army in 1968, I was kind of kicking around looking for some kind of a hobby to do outside of my work, and I just sort of stumbled onto this. I was in an antique store and was interested in looking at a clock and the manager of the antique stores had all do repair these too? I have some clocks that need to be repaired. And, of course, I said, “Yes, I do.” And I found that people were willing to pay me money to play with these clocks. And I said, “Gee, how long has this been going on?” And it turns out that it’s been going on for several hundered years. And it’s just a wonderful thing.
Jennifer Berglund 03:26
I would say that your interest in tinkering started well, before that.
Richard Ketchen 03:31
Yes, it did. And I’m a graduate of Wentworth Institute, and so I have a good background in machine shop practice and mechanical design. So, I like to say that I can make any part for any clock. And I can do it in such a way that you really can’t tell that it’s new or old.
Jennifer Berglund 03:47
That’s pretty incredible.
Richard Ketchen 03:48
It fulfills a lot of needs. I like to tell my friends that I get a little twitchy if I can’t get down to the shop and file on a piece of metal at least once a day.
Jennifer Berglund 04:00
So, you work on our collection of clocks at the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, which I want to talk about and a little bit. There’s such a variety of clocks, and you work on everything that’s not electronics, essentially.
Richard Ketchen 04:13
Correct.
Jennifer Berglund 04:14
So, you’ve got to know a lot about a lot because every clock is so different. How do you approach a clock? What’s the first thing you do when you start assessing a clock, start looking at a new clock?
Richard Ketchen 04:26
It depends on what the object is, for my being there with a clock. If I’m looking at a clock that’s in a household, I’m looking for problems with that clock as soon as I get in the door. I’m looking to see if hands are stuck together, which often happens, looking to see if it’s wound up because some people don’t realize that a clock needs to be wound up. If I’ve got a clock here in the shop, one of the first things I do is start making a list of things about that clock. I’m making a punch list. I’m taking the clock apart gradually and writing down things that I find as I go along, looking for things that are worn out, looking for things that are broken, and worst of all, I’m looking for poor quality repair work that’s been done before me. I often say that with any average clock, I spend a third to a half of my time undoing what other people have done in order to do a good quality job.
Jennifer Berglund 05:21
Is it usually the owners or previous owners of the clock that have just tried to mess with it?
Richard Ketchen 05:25
Always. It seems like it’s everybody. It’s the amateur. It’s also people that are actually in the business that really don’t know what they’re doing. And I wind up cleaning up after a lot of them.
Jennifer Berglund 05:38
Well, so this is an interesting point though. You can’t really train under anyone these days to learn how to repair clocks. You can’t go to school for it, necessarily. So how did you develop this skill set?
Richard Ketchen 05:53
As I said, I have a good background in machine shop practice and mechanical design, so it just sort of comes naturally. But also, I found there’s a huge amount of knowledge out there in books. I’ve got a horological library of probably close to 900 books at this point. And it’s not that I go around and count them, but at one point, I decided to put bookplates in them and I had 1000 bookplates printed up and I’ve got less than 100 left. But the knowledge is all there in the books. You can find almost everything you need to know if you’re willing to do the research and you’re willing to do the study. And I like to say that I’m an autodidact. I’m self-taught. I’ve read. And one of my friends said, “well, most clockmakers don’t read, that’s what makes you different.”
Jennifer Berglund 06:11
Wow. Was it once a profession where you could train under a clockmaker was there?
Richard Ketchen 06:46
Yes, very much so. There was an apprentice situation set up in England, and in this country as well, back in the old days when people actually did apprenticeships. And people would train for that job under the master. Oftentimes, they would wind up marrying the Master’s daughter and acquiring the business when the master retired or died. That doesn’t happen that way anymore. Most people come at it from a collector’s point of view and then get interested in the mechanism.
Jennifer Berglund 07:18
Let’s talk about the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments and the clock collection there. Tell me a little bit about that collection, the kinds of clocks that we have, and what makes them special.
Richard Ketchen 07:30
I look at that collection that’s at the Science Center, and I say this is not a collection that a collector would put together. It’s kind of eclectic. But the thing that ties it all together is the fact that all of these clocks were owned by Harvard. They were all used by Harvard in either the observatory or in the laboratories. And when these clocks were purchased, most of them were brand new and they were state of the art at the time. And over the years, they just became pieces of old, used equipment, and they got shunted off to the store rooms. Back about 60-70 years ago, there was a man named David Wheatland, who was working at Harvard noticed all these clocks and the scientific instruments and the fact that some of them were starting to get away. They were being thrown out. They were being sold to antique dealers. And he started collecting them, saving them. Many of them he bought back from antique dealers using his own money and then donating them back to Harvard. Rumor has it there was even some dumpster diving involved to save some of these things.
Jennifer Berglund 08:34
They were used as instruments of science. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Richard Ketchen 08:41
Well, if they were timing an event, especially in astronomy. I’m not an astronomer. Sara Schechner would know exactly how they were used. But if they were watching a star transit, wanted to know the time between one event and another event, they would be watching that clock. And some of those clocks were designed so that they were very easily read. And the most prominent part were the minutes and the seconds, they didn’t really care so much about the hours. And they had to be very accurate. In astronomy, especially these telescopes, were in big, unheated buildings, because they didn’t want to deal with temperature changes in the telescope itself. And same situation happened with the clocks. So, many of these clocks had to have temperature compensating pendulums on them and be able to
Jennifer Berglund 09:29
What’s that?
Richard Ketchen 09:29
Oh, well, the part that is the actual timekeeper of the clock is the pendulum and if the pendulum
Jennifer Berglund 09:36
That’s the thing that tocks
Richard Ketchen 09:37
It’s the part that goes back and forth and ticks. And if the temperature changes, if it gets hotter or it gets colder, then the pendulum rod is going to expand or contract and the timekeeping will be different. So they found ways of using various combinations of metal to keep the center of mass of that vibrating pendulum in exactly the same place and keep the same time whether it was hot or cold. The very early ones had a great big jar of mercury at the bottom of the pendulum. And if the room got hot, and the pendulum rod expanded, it got longer, this jar of mercury sitting down at the bottom, and it expands as well. And it expands up as the pendulum rod is expanding down. And since the coefficient of linear expansion of both the mercury and the steel pendulum rod are vastly different, they put just the right amount of mercury in there so that they cancel each other out and the center of gravity stays the same, and then the clock will keep pretty accurate time. And they did it in several different ways. You could also do it with other combinations of metals that had different expansion rates. The very early ones, which we do not have an example of there, were what was called a grid iron pendulum, and it was invented by John Harrison, who was the man who developed longitude, or the ability to find longitude by using a clock. And he would set these up so that the steel parts were in expansion and the brass parts were in compression, and they canceled each other out. You could do the same thing with zinc and steel, which was also a very good way of doing it. And of course, mercury and steel.
Jennifer Berglund 11:16
I’m glad you brought up Harrison and the ability to measure and read longitude. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? What’s the significance of that? How did it work? And what’s the significance of that?
Richard Ketchen 11:27
Well, the significance is that you needed to be able to tell where you were in the world on the ocean so that you didn’t run into the land unexpectedly. And it allowed them to navigate. You could figure out pretty closely where you were by taking a lunar or sun observations at noon time and comparing that with the clock, which you would set back at the port where you left and see what the difference in the time was, and then you could plot pretty closely within a couple of miles where you work in the world at sea. And this is what allowed the British to pretty much dominate the world in shipping and in naval endeavors, this ability to navigate. And he was the one who actually proved that you could make a clock that would work at sea, and that it was a doable thing. And I’ve worked on a couple of reproductions of those clocks, and boy, they are massive. They’re big pieces of equipment. And they’re very complicated. But this was a proof of concept model. And later on, these chronometers, as they are called, got to be very, very simple and very accurate. And every ship had them. If it was a big important ship, sometimes they’d have half a dozen of them and they would compare the results.
Jennifer Berglund 12:37
How is a chronometer different from the clock we normally think of with the dangling pendulum?
Richard Ketchen 12:45
Many of the clocks that I’m working on are weight-driven pendulum clocks. A chronometer has a balance wheel in it, and is spring-driven. And you cannot use a pendulum in a boat. And it also doesn’t work very well to have a weight-driven clock and a boat as the boat is going up and down in the waves, there’s a point where the weight gets lighter or it gets heavier, depending on which direction the boat’s going, up or down, on the waves. And that has an effect on the timekeeping of the clock. You need to have a very, very constant power source and give that pendulum or that balance wheel exactly the same push every time it ticks. Boy, there are whole books written about that. Wonderful subjects to explore.
Jennifer Berglund 13:29
Which I’m sure you have in your library.
Richard Ketchen 13:31
I do.
Jennifer Berglund 13:32
And so it uses a spring. So how do you time the springing of the spring?
Richard Ketchen 13:38
There is another complicated mechanism called a fusee, which is a tapered spool with a thread cut in it and a cord wrapped around it that’s wrapped around the barrel that has the spring in it. And when the clock is fully wound up, the string that’s wrapped around that fusee is pulling at the smallest diameter, so it has a mechanical disadvantage. When the spring is almost unwound, it’s pulling on the biggest part of the fusee and it has a great mechanical advantage. So it evens out the spring tension throughout the winding cycle of the spring. Another fascinating area.
Jennifer Berglund 14:12
That is super fascinating. Yeah, so it’s all about mechanisms sort of cancelling each other out.
Richard Ketchen 14:18
Yes.
Jennifer Berglund 14:19
So what are the other kinds of clocks that you find in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments? What would they be used for?
Richard Ketchen 14:27
Most of them fall under the category of astronomical regulators. Any clock that’s used to time another clock or an event is often called a regulator. And it’s just a very nice series of state-of-the-art clocks at the time they were bought, ranging from the very simplest one, which was from probably the late 1600s, which was made by Thomas Thompian. And by today’s standards, it’s not a very accurate clock, but it does have a second speeding pendulum. Every time it ticks, one second has gone by. And the clock has a second hand, which many clocks from that period did not. And over a short period of time, it was fairly accurate. And that goes all the way up through a series of clocks till you get to the clocks at the other end of the spectrum. There are Riefler clocks, which were made in Germany by Sigmund Riefler. And they had temperature-compensating pendulums, and they had special escapements. The escapement is the part that ticks. And they would put these in vacuum chambers. They found the clock ran better in a lower atmosphere than in a high-pressure atmosphere at sea level. They could pump down these things. And they found that they could actually do some fine regulation of the timekeeping of the clock by adjusting the pressure that was in the tank that the clock was in. Some pretty interesting things, and of course, all this went to pieces when they discovered the quartz crystal clocks and the atomic clocks, which I don’t think we have an example of there. They’ve got a pretty good line of clocks from the mechanical age starting pretty much the beginning of accurate clocks to the very end of the mechanical clocks that were very accurate.
Jennifer Berglund 16:01
Can you talk a little bit about the advancements that were made after that all the way up to the atomic clock, like what kind of incremental advancements were made to where we are today?
Richard Ketchen 16:11
Where we are today is a mechanical clock is pretty much a collector’s item. Not very many of them are actually being used scientifically because we have clocks that are so much better. The advancement of those clocks is what I find so interesting. And the advances took place in, as I have mentioned, the temperature-compensation for the pendulum, but they also found out that barometric pressure changed as well and affected the clock, and they had some clocks that actually had barometric compensation on the pendulum. They found that there was a thing that we call isochronism them where the clock would beat the same whether it was in a long arc or a short arc. Contrary to popular opinion, pendulums don’t keep the same time if they are in different arcs. Most people think that they do, but we find out that they don’t. If the pendulum has a very wide swing, it keeps a different time from when it has a very narrow swing. And so the way that you control that is by having the clock have the same swing all the time. And the way that you control that is by how much power gets through the escapement to push that pendulum. So there were wonderful, wonderful, exotic escapements that were made to make sure that that pendulum got exactly the same push every single time day in and day out. And it’s a fascinating area to explore. There are people who do nothing but collect exotic escapements for these clocks.
Jennifer Berglund 17:40
That’s a very niche collector’s item.
Richard Ketchen 17:43
Yes, and I have a friend up in New Hampshire who is one of what I call my high end collectors, who collects nothing but clocks with odd escapements on them. And some of them work very well, and they’re just fun to explore. I’ve got books that talk about nothing but these escapements and a variety of them. And even still, I occasionally run across an escapement that is not in the book. And it’s just kind of fun to watch that work, figure out what’s going on with it, figure out how to improve it and make it work better. And it’s a never ending source of enjoyment for me.
Jennifer Berglund 18:16
You were talking about different advancements and escapements, and we were talking about the incremental improvements all the way up to the atomic clock. What was the need to get more and more accurate time?
Richard Ketchen 18:34
Space travel, for one thing. Timing everything on these rockets that are going up to the moon or up to the space station, everything has to happen exactly right. And it can be something as non-technical as the stock market and stock trades and who gets there first. Who put their bid in first, or who put their bid in before the market crashed, or whatever. It’s all done in millionths of seconds, I think.
Jennifer Berglund 19:00
Is there such a thing as absolute time? Like, you know, how you have absolute zero? Is there? Is there such a thing as absolute time?
Richard Ketchen 19:09
That’s an interesting question because, for many years, up until quite recently, people thought that the solar system and the Earth itself was the perfect timekeeper. And it turns out that it isn’t, it occasionally wobbles a little bit. And they found that the atomic clocks that we make now are more accurate than the solar system is
Jennifer Berglund 19:30
Really?
Richard Ketchen 19:31
More consistent. There were some interesting things that happened with the atomic clocks. They were able to find that the clock kept a different time based on how far from the center of the earth it is. And if you had a clock in an airplane, it was keeping a little bit different time than a clock that was on the ground. You had a clock that was down at the bottom of a very deep mine, it would keep a slightly different time than when that was on the surface. And I attended a conference a few years ago where somebody was talking about these clocks and they said, “well, let’s do a little experiment with this.” These atomic clocks are massive affairs. And they’re built on great big, heavy cast iron tables, big surface plates, as they would say in the laboratory. They put some car jacks underneath them, or some hydraulic jacks, and they lifted this up about six inches, and they were actually able to see the difference in the timekeeping.
Jennifer Berglund 20:23
Wow!
Richard Ketchen 20:24
So, is there an absolute time? I’m not sure if there really is an absolute perfect time.
Jennifer Berglund 20:30
So you’re saying it’s relative.
Richard Ketchen 20:31
Everything is relative, yes.
Jennifer Berglund 20:37
You started off just repairing antique clocks in the antique shop, and you gradually got to repairing these very precise, increasingly precise scientific instruments that were used for science, starting out at the antique store. How did you end up repairing these precise instruments?
Richard Ketchen 20:58
It’s a matter of experience. It’s a matter of contacts, who you know. It’s a matter of trust. As I did this for a hobby for many years, I was a member, and I still am a member of, various club clubs, and I did a lot of technical lectures. And so I met a lot of people through that. And I kind of attained what you might call gurus status because I was lecturing. And so, when my engineering job went away with the economy in 1990, I didn’t feel like looking for another job. I was in a good position to be able to do that. And I had a friend who was in the antique business, and he said, “well, if you’re going to do that full time, work on clocks full time, he said, I can keep you busy for the next three months.” And that went on and on. And people get to know you, people get to trust you. One of the more important people that I met in person who helped me a lot was Will Andrews who was the curator of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, before Sara Schechner was, and he gave me the opportunity to work on some pretty interesting clocks. And he trusted me to do that. There’s a couple of ways you can tell how good somebody is in this business. One, you can just talk to them and see what they know. The other thing is, if you walk into somebody’s shop, you can look around and instantly see their level of expertise by the machinery that they have. And also the books. It’s not something that’s going to happen instantly. This is a 50-year project, and it’s still going on.
Jennifer Berglund 22:30
How many people are interested in horology in the US, for instance? Is it a big sort of
Richard Ketchen 22:36
It’s a big organization. I’m not sure how many people are in that, but it numbers in the thousands. And it seems like most of the people I know are interested in clocks. I have a lot of clock friends, so I guess that bias is right. Yeah.
Jennifer Berglund 22:49
So do they all have backgrounds like you? Are they very interested in mechanical engineering, that kind of thing?
Richard Ketchen 22:56
Most of them are collectors, and they’re interested in it from a collector’s viewpoint. And that can be involved in many areas. You can collect from the viewpoint of rarity. You can collect American clocks. You can collect wooden works clocks. I’m sure there’s somebody out there that collects cuckoo clocks, but I don’t know. So there’s just such a wide variety of collecting areas in this. And some people are interested in the technical end of things, and they don’t have the background that I have, and they can’t work on them, but they can understand them. And so I get to work on them.
Jennifer Berglund 23:34
Is there something that they have in common that brings them to clocks?
Richard Ketchen 23:40
They all seem to be different. As I said, I have customers who just have one clock and they like it. But sometimes that leads to another one and then to another one, and pretty soon you’re addicted.
Jennifer Berglund 23:53
A clock addiction. An addiction to keeping time. What’s the strangest clock that you’ve ever worked on?
Richard Ketchen 24:00
That’s an interesting question and I’m not sure how to answer it. Well, the strangest clocks that I’ve seen. There was a fellow who is long gone now, but he used to take cuckoo clocks and take the mechanisms out of them, and he would make animated scenes that were powered by the clocks.
Jennifer Berglund 24:18
Wow. That’s fascinating.
Richard Ketchen 24:20
I don’t see any clocks as being strange. I’ve seen some pretty ugly clocks. As a matter of fact, I’ve been to clock shows where they have a contest for ugly clocks. Oh yes, there’s some pretty ugly clocks. There’s no accounting for people’s taste. But there are clocks that are extremely simple, that do nothing but tell time, and there are clocks that are extremely complicated, which would have all kinds of calendar functions on them. Calendars that accounted for the long and short months and compensate for those and even leap year. So, you get a clock like that, and there’s a wheel in that clock that turns once every four years. Tells when Leap Year is. There are clocks that have a lot of musical functions on them. There’s a clock at the Fogg Museum that’s Dutch, made by Otto Von Maur in Amsterdam. And it plays a tune on the hour, plays a different tune on the half hour. And it has a selection of four pairs of tunes that it will play. And it’s got probably about 25 little bells inside that it plays the tunes on. And then it has calendar functions on it. It has an automated scene on the dial of musicians playing instruments while the music is playing. And it tells the time as well. I don’t know about strange clocks, but I certainly get involved in very complicated clocks. So there’s a lot going on in a clock like that.
Jennifer Berglund 24:28
Really? In your opinion, what’s the most fascinating advancement in clock technology?
Richard Ketchen 25:52
It’s the advancement of accuracy. And that is the business with the temperature compensation in the pendulums and the large variety of odd escapements, the part that powers the pendulum and the different ways that they do that. And I find those just absolutely fascinating, and that’s really what I’m very interested in.
Jennifer Berglund 26:13
Was there a particular escapement that was a giant leap in terms of the technology?
Richard Ketchen 26:19
There have been several, one of them was when George Graham invented what was called the Deadbeat Escapement. And if you look at a typical grandfather clock, and you look at the second hand, you will see that it sort of bounces. It recoils. It goes a little backwards before it goes forwards again. And it’s called a recoil escapement. That was a great improvement on what was before that. But then, George Graham came along and said, “well, there’s a lot of power being wasted there, and a lot of that energy is being absorbed by the pendulum actually making the clock back up a little bit.” He invented what was called a Deadbeat Escapement that did not recoil, did not back up. The escape wheel tooth lands on a pallet that is essentially what we call a dead surface. It doesn’t really make the clock go backwards, and there’s also an impulse face on that palette where it’s an inclined plane that the tooth runs down and gives that pendulum a push. And that was considered to be a great, great improvement in accuracy and clocks. And then they got into the escapement that is in Big Ben in London, which is what’s called a gravity escapement, where every tick of the clock, the little arm gets clocked or reset gets moved up a little bit. And then as the pendulum comes over and unlocks it, gravity makes that want to come down to center and it gives the pendulum a little push in each direction. There were two of these gravity arms. And they found that that was an extremely constant form of impulse to the pendulum. And that clock works wonderfully well. And they’ve adapted that escapement to some of the astronomical regulators that I see, particularly the ones by the Howard company in Boston, and the Bond company in Boston, and there’s quite a few bond clocks at Harvard that have some of these gravity escapements on them. And they’re just wonderful things to see work or to make work.
Jennifer Berglund 28:13
Do you have a favorite clockmaker?
Richard Ketchen 28:15
I do indeed. There was a clock and watchmaker in upstate New York named Charles Fasoldt. He was a German immigrant. He was working in the 1850s 1890s, and he made his fame by making watches, and he made some very, very accurate precision watches, using his own escapement that he invented. But he also made maybe about 30 clocks, ranging anywhere from a little tiny table clock up to astronomical regulators, and even some tower clocks that are used to run big public dials on towers. And he used these escapements in those clocks. I’ve worked on probably 20 of those 30 clocks that are extant. I’ve been very fortunate to have a couple of collector friends who specialize in those clocks, and they’ve got the money to acquire them. And I’ve actually made a couple of clocks in that style, I like them so much.
Jennifer Berglund 29:15
You’ve made your own clocks. Tell me about that. And what has the act of making your own clock made you appreciate about clockmakers and the technology of the clock?
Richard Ketchen 29:27
Well, if you’re making a clock, you’re doing some things that you will probably never do in repair work. You make parts. You have to make everything for them. And I started off making a banjo clock movement. And what’s a banjo clock? It was a clock that Simon Willard invented back in the early 1800s. And it’s a very, very basic clock. It’s the classic style is form follows function. It has a round top that’s got the dial in it. It’s got a long, thin neck that the pendulum swings in, and down at the bottom, it’s got a box that the pendulum bob swings in. And so it’s all, as I say, form follows function. And some of them were very, very pretty. And I happen to have acquired an empty case that was made by the Howard company. And that was a good start to make a simple clock like that and try to make it as true to what the original would have been like. And it helped me to acquire the equipment that was needed to do that. I oftentimes had to make pieces of equipment or tools to make that clock as I went along, which I was then able to use on other clocks as well. And I suppose many people who get into the clockmaking business we’ll start off with a banjo clock because it’s so simple. But then I wanted to get into some of these more precision clocks, and I made a series of three astronomical regulators, one of which I was able to keep, and I have here in the shop as my shop regulator, and it keeps a very accurate time. And it has zinc and steel temperature compensating pendulum and a couple of other little oddities that make it interesting. But this sort of thing, I think, helps with the clock business because people come along with their clock, and they say, “do I want to trust this person with my precious clock or not?” And then if I show them a clock that I’ve actually made, then that gives them the confidence to leave their clock with me. It also helps to attain guru status in the business if you’ve made some of these clocks. And especially if you’ve made something that’s pretty exotic. This clock has jeweled palettes in it palette is the part that ticks and it’s a part that wears out on clocks. And if you make the surface that wears out out of something that’s extremely hard, like sapphire. In this case, it was a synthetic sapphire, it’s got a hardness rating of about nine on the Mohs hardness test, which is from zero to 10, 10 being a diamond. So there aren’t very many people around who can do that, so that impresses people when they see that, and they’re much more liable to trust you with their things.
Jennifer Berglund 32:10
Beyond just your own fascination, it’s just good for business.
Richard Ketchen 32:13
It’s good for business. And one of the books that I read said that that’s one of the most important things that a clockmaker can do is to make his own shop regulator for a number of reasons. I probably would have a hard time affording to buy an old one, but I can make one for almost nothing. Except for my time, of course.
Jennifer Berglund 32:30
Of course, of course. Time is money. Speaking of books, I’m just curious, for someone who doesn’t know anything about clocks, but it’s interested in learning, is there a particular book that you would recommend?
Richard Ketchen 32:41
It depends on what area you were interested in learning about. There’s a lot of coffee table books, which are big, fluffy books that have a lot of pictures in them. I find those very useful for identifying and dating clocks. You can go the other end of that to books by Donald deCaro, and Gazeley and Goodrich, who are technical people and write about how to repair these clocks and how they function, tell us what’s going on inside there. And I would recommend that people would start with those books. If you’re like me, you just buy every one that you find. Which is why you’re a great person to ask for recommendations is because you have a collection of at least 900 books in your library exclusively on horology. Yes, indeed. What is it about keeping time that fascinates you most? It’s something that I found that I’m good at. I can make a living at it. I can spend all day down here in the shop and still come down in the evening and want to work more. I’m just so tied up in it. Clocks are a useful object. It’s not like a gun collection where somebody could get hurt with the things that you’re working on. It’s not like an antique car, which I do have, but, you know, every time you take that out on the road, it’s vulnerable. You could lose it in an accident. And it’s static. The car sits in the garage most of the time. The clocks are all over the house, and they’re being used. And they’re important to us. We look at them to see what time it is. And they’re pretty. They’re fascinating things. I know what’s going on inside them. And that fascinates me. Basically, they’re useful objects that aren’t doing anybody any harm. And they’re technical and I like technical things. I’ve got a lot of nice old bamboo fly rods that I was using for a while, but I haven’t been fishing in years. Even still, when I was doing a lot of fishing, the rods are sitting there in their tubes most of the time not being used. The clock is on the wall ticking away. And I’m using it every day, day in and day out.
Jennifer Berglund 35:08
Richard Ketchen, thank you so much for being here. This has been so much fun.
Richard Ketchen 35:12
Thank you for interviewing me and it’s been fun for me. I love to talk about clocks.
Jennifer Berglund 35:27
Today’s HMSC Connects! podcast was edited by Emma Knudsen, and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Sadly, Emma is leaving Harvard for another wonderful opportunity at Mass Audubon. We’re super excited for her and wish her the very best on her new adventure. Thanks for all your amazing work on this podcast, Emma! We’d also like to thank the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and Richard Ketchen for his wisdom and expertise on this episode. And thank you so much for listening! If you’d like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you in a couple of weeks.