The Magic of Telechron Clocks

The Magic of Telechron Clocks

It was 1916, and Henry Warren had an interesting problem.

Warren had invented an electric clock powered by a compact, self-starting, synchronous motor. “Synchronous” was the best part—that  meant that the motor rotated precisely in step with the 60 cycles per second of the predominant alternating current in the United States. Sixty Hertz, to use the proper units. In essence, Warren’s motors “knew” that one second equaled sixty oscillations of their power source. The very electricity that powered his clocks defined what one second meant.

Except that in 1916, no power company in the United States provided regulated 60 Hertz power.

That may have been the standard to which power companies aspired, but their product varied considerably. From minute to minute, from second to second, the current frequency varied. It was the generators at the power plants. They ran within a wide range of speeds, not at only one precision maintained speed. For a light bulb, this didn’t matter. A light bulb would glow pretty much the same at 43 Hertz, 67 Hertz, 54 Hertz … the exact frequency of that storied sine wave didn’t make too much difference to a light bulb filament.

But with that kind of frequency variation, one couldn’t make a proper electric vacuum cleaner. Nor an electric clothes washing machine. Nor an electric sewing machine, the most sophisticated consumer product on the planet at that time. Nor precision medical equipment.

Back to Henry Warren’s problem—if the alternating current power supply wasn’t precisely tuned to sixty cycles per second, his theoretically fully functional electric clock design was inaccurate and therefore absolutely useless.

Henry Warren solved this problem by developing a governor, which he called the “Master Clock,” which could control the current delivered by a power company through a feedback mechanism.

Warren Master Clocks were straightforward in their design and use. They were quite beautiful machines, actually. They looked rather like the grandfather clocks of their day, pendulums and all. But instead of a single clock face, they had three, vertically arranged at the top of their tall wooden cases.

The bottom dial, with twelve hours and the traditional hour and minute hands, was driven by a highly accurate mechanical movement, pendulum included. The center dial was divided into five one minute sectors, and had two superimposed hands, one black, the other gold. The black hand was driven by that splendid mechanical movement. The gold hand was driven by a synchronous motor, tied into the power generators of the plant. A synchronous motor that turned at the exact same frequency of the alternating current that powered it.

Both the black and the gold hands of that middle dial moved as second hands, making a complete revolution around the dial in five minutes.The upper dial was a backup, matching that middle dial, with just one gold hand also driven by a second synchronous motor whose hand also moved around a matching 5-minute dial. This backup stood ready in case the main synchronous motor should fail, or for when it needed routine service.

The Warren Master Clock was intuitive. The power plant generators were running at 60 Herz when both the black and gold hands on the main dial were super-imposed upon each other, moving in unison around their dial. Any deviation was easy to see and would let the technicians know how much to adjust the generators in order to keep the line current at 60 Herz.

Warren took his Master Clock to Boston Edison, which at first resisted his idea. There was really no market pressure, clamoring for electric clocks, upon the power company, since such clocks didn’t exist yet outside Warren’s lab. But there was another market pressure developing: radio. Radio more than any other appliance demanded precisely regulated AC current. Radio, plus all the other aforementioned consumer technologies, influenced Boston Edison to give Warren’s Master Clock a try.

And they were delighted with the results.

By the mid-1920s over 400 Warren Master Clocks had been manufactured and installed in power plants around the United States. They sold for $400 apiece, some $9,200 in 2018 dollars. They paved the way for consumer and commercial electric appliances as we know them today. They also paved the way for Henry Warren’s electric clocks.

For his company, at first called the Warren Clock Company, Warren eventually chose the name “Telechron,” from the Greek suggesting “time over a distance.” Appropriate, considering the vast web of electric transmission wires that were woven over most of the U.S. in less than a decade.

As Warren geared up Telechron to manufacture electric clocks in quantity, a battle was being waged between Thomas Edison’s vision of direct current versus General Electric’s method of alternating current. GE and AC won out and, with an obvious desire to maximize the uses to which electric current could be put, expressed an interest in the nascent Telechron brand. Warren sold a 49 percent interest to GE in 1919, maintaining a controlling 51 percent interest and serving as president of the company.

As the U.S. economy boomed after the end of World War I, Telechron really took off. According to Jim Linz’ definitive book, Electrifying Time, sales of Telechron clocks “increased from 87,000 in 1927 to almost 4.3 million in 1937.” Keeping in mind that the Great Depression started with the Crash in October 1929, that is an especially impressive achievement!

Telechron clocks were fine examples of robust and esthetic industrial design. They came in four flavors. Roughly half were labeled “Telechron” on the face; the other half, “GE” or “GE Telechron.” Then, two of the finest U.S. mechanical clock companies, Revere and Herschede, contracted with Telechron to make electric versions of their clocks. These are some of the most varied and beautiful Art Deco clocks made; their cases never fail to thrill with their clean lines and elegant curves.

Telechron movements came in several sizes, ranging from three inch diameters to six inch diameters. Clock faces were silver, gold, white, black; textures were smooth, indented and even guilloche. Fonts were quite the thing: Telechron was King of Creative Fonts. Clock cases were made of all sorts of wood, metals, Bakelite plastic, Catalin plastic and even onyx. Cords were fabric covered in the early days and always somewhat a matter of self-consciousness for the Telechron brand. In an era when unreliable, dangerous batteries and wind-up keys were the only alternatives, however, the striking innovation of electric clocks was compelling to many.

Telechrons hummed, they never ticked.

Nearly every Telechron model ever made—though generally not the Reveres and Herschedes—sported the iconic red dot somewhere on the face. This was an internal flag of sorts, that was held in place by the same electric field that powered the clock’s motor. During normal operation, the flag matched the clock’s face in color. When the power inevitably went out, though, then the flag dropped and turned red. This informed the clock’s owner that their accurate electric time had been interrupted. Radio time or a reliable pocket watch would then be consulted, and the Telechron reset. This was a sensible mechanism in an age when power supplies were not as reliable as those we enjoy today.

One of the attributes of Telechrons that impresses me is that they still work. I’ve restored north of 40 Telechrons in recent years, most of them over seventy years old. After some careful restoration they run quiet and keep accurate time. How many of today’s technological artifacts will we be able to say that about? Another admirable quality of Telechron clocks is their thoughtful design. They are easy to disassemble, work on and put back together again. Their mechanisms are made of brass and bronze and steel and they simply do not mechanically wear out or fail in any kind of normal human time frame. And the way they are put together just makes sense. There’s a life metaphor in that sensible design.

Telechrons also avoid batteries, which were unreliable for decades. Once batteries were improved in the 1950s, and the quartz movement was invented, people started buying battery-powered clocks so that they wouldn’t see a cord running down their wall. And so we have littered our landscape with heavy metals and toxic chemicals as we’ve thrown away disposable alkaline batteries by the hundreds of millions.

The last thing to mention about Telechron clocks is the cautionary tale of their demise. You see, when the whole battery/quartz movement revolution happened in the 1950s and 1960s, and competition decimated Telechron sales, parent company General Electric cheapened the design, the casings, the gear materials, the screws that held the clocks together—everything. With stiff competition and inferior products, the company eventually disappeared.

It is, to me, a profound business question to ask: What would have happened if, in the face of decreased sales and increased competition, Telechron had radically improved its quality instead?

My own reflection upon that question is that if we react to external pressures by becoming even better than we were before, we will always succeed.

This particularly special beauty is my Telechron 505 Queen Anne Replica. The mechanism is an original 6 inch movement; the new case is by Rick Wilson. They only made 16 of these Queen Annes back in 1927; we’ll probably never see one in person. So I had no choice but to make one myself! After all, our own Elfred Norcross has one of those sixteen original Queen Annes right there on her office desk.

For more on how that happened, you’ll just have to read our novel!

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No discussion of Telechron clocks in the present day would be complete without mention of Silverdollar Productions:
http://silverdollarproductions.net/

In my (considerable) experience, Al, Tom, Leah and the other folks at Silverdollar are the finest site For Telechron, Revere, & General Electric vintage clock repair services.

You may spend a delightful hour or more on their website, viewing an extraordinary number of beautiful, well-designed clocks. And they all still work, or work again, thanks to these folks’ skills and efforts. Here are three unusual examples that Tom emailed us: