National Watch and Clock Museum, Columbia, Pennsylvania

     I like learning new things - if it's not too difficult, or complicated, or technical.  I guess you could say I'm into lite learning.  Lite learning is the purpose of class trips, equal parts fun and education.  The National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania is the perfect class trip - or senior outing.  http://www.nawcc.org/index.php/museum
     The first thing I learned on this outing was a new word - horology.  Horology is the study and measurement of time and the art of making clocks and watches.  Humans first measured time with sun dials (for daily measurements) and with huge monuments (like Stonehenge) for seasonal measurements.  Now we use atomic clocks.  Here's a good article that covers most of what the museum presents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices 

The museum has a big collection of long case clocks.  They are also called tall case clocks or just tall clocks; however, most of us call them grandfather clocks.  

Clocks got small enough to put on the wall.

Or on the table.  Eventually, time pieces got small enough to wear on the wrist.  The museum has an extensive pocket watch and wrist watch display, but I didn't get into that in this post.  

Telling time at sea was more difficult than telling time on land until the development of marine chronometers.  

Here is a nice display of car clocks.

Europeans developed a round clock face, but Asians developed pillar clocks called Shaku-dokei.  The passage of time was read from top to bottom, and the hour markings were unequal.  Evidently, some hours of the day deserved more space on the pillar - hmmm, maybe cocktail hour?

These novelty clocks are called Pendulettes.  The cases are made from wood dust and resin.  The politically incorrect minstrel singer (second row up from the bottom, second clock from the left) was a sign of the times when this clock was manufactured.  

More novelty clocks.  These are rolling eye clocks.  The right eye marked the hour, and the left eye marked the minute.

Another novelty clock, the mystery clock.  These clocks are called mystery clocks or impossible clocks because the hands float on the glass with seemingly no mechanism to propel their movement around the dial.  The first mystery clocks were invented by a Frenchman named Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin.  Robert-Houdin was a clock maker and a magician.  Ehrich Weiss took the stage name Harry Houdini to honor Robert-Houdin, whom Harry Houdini considered to be "the father of modern magic."  Here's an article about how mystery clocks work -
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/clocks-watches/mystery-clock.htm

Mike is standing in front of an astronomical clock.  Astronomical clocks show the time of day as well as astronomical information such as the position of the sun, moon, and constellations of the zodiac.  Pennsylvanian, Stephen Engle, spent twenty years of his spare time building this clock, completing it in the 1870's.  This clock was more for entertainment than accurate time keeping.  During the course of an hour, the clock played hymns and patriotic songs while Jesus, Satan, the disciples, Father Time, and even Molly Pitcher popped out of the doors surrounding the clock face.  The clock was exhibited all over the United States until the 1950's when it disappeared.  It turned up in upstate New York in 1983 and came to the museum a couple of years later.  

     My big take away from this museum visit was the explanation for how we got the four time zones - Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific.  Before time zones, every town in the United States operated on it's own time based on high noon.  Everybody who had a watch set it to 12:00 when the sun was directly overhead.  We had Hainesport time, Philadelphia time, and Lancaster time.  This didn't present a big problem when people walked or rode on horseback from place to place, but it created a mess when people began traveling  with lightening speed - on trains.   In order for everyone to be on the same schedule, the U.S. and Canadian railroads instituted standard time in time zones in 1883.  The railroad's system became law with the passage of the Standard Time Act of 1918.  Maybe I should have learned this in school, but, as they say, better late than never.