A Tale of Two Clocks
A tale of two clocks
The term “Vienna Regulator” brings to many people’s minds a long, narrow wall clock, particularly those with fancy carved tops and columns on the doors made by that great clockmaker Gustav Becker. Why, some even had horsies on top! Dana Blackwell (1) once observed “Today ‘Vienna Regulator’ has become more of a generic term for any long narrow wall clock..”.
In my collecting and, later, selling of Vienna Regulators from Austria, and “Vienna style” regulators from the German factories, I have come to appreciate the variety of styles and heritage associated with these clocks. Vienna Regulators and the Vienna-style regulators are first and foremost “Regulators”, with implied accuracy from being weight driven, and from the use of Graham dead beat escapements. The wide variety of case designs reflect the furniture styles prevalent where and when they were made. Today we can find an amazing and disparate assortment, everything from the rectilinear simplicity of an early 1800s Viennese laturndluhren to the ornate exuberance of the later Altdeutsche period, or the smooth, flowing lines of the Serpentine cases. In addition to these variations in cases we also find fundamental differences between the hand-made Viennese and the German factory-made mechanisms – perhaps as different from each other as a hand-made Aston Martin and a production line Ford Taurus
It is hard to believe that all lumped into the genre of Vienna Regulators!
One of my recent shipments of clocks from Austria contained two rather special examples of what are commonly-called “Vienna Regulators”. While both are floor-standing clocks (Bodenstanduhren in German), and both run for longer than a week (making them long duration clocks), they differ in one very interesting, and important way: One is Austrian, hence a “Vienna Regulator”, the other is German, made in the Viennese-style by Gustav Becker.
This article focuses on their similarities, as well as their differences, and hopefully provides a simplistic understanding of the social and economic realities behind their development. Since the Austrians began making Vienna Regulator roughly a half century before the German factories began making Vienna-style regulators, lets first look into the origins of the Austrian Vienna Regulators.
If you would like to see more pictures of these two clocks please follow these links:
The Becker clock - http://snclocks.smugmug.com/Fantastic-Clock-Mechanisms/VR-639-2-Month-Duration
The Salfer clock - http://snclocks.smugmug.com/Fantastic-Clock-Mechanisms/VR-641-2-month-3-Weight
Figure 1b - Floor-Standing Regulator by the Braunau Gustav Becker Factory
Those pesky Americans and their cheap clocks
We now fast forward to the mid-nineteenth century. American mass-produced clocks are making inroads in Europe, decimating the individual clock makers in the Black Forest region. It was up to individuals like Gustav Becker and Eduard Hauser (perhaps more recognizable if we think of the village where he made clocks - Lenzkirch) to found factories and use the techniques developed in American factories to produce clocks in Germany (10). The industrial revolution was generating new economic classes – workers and the merchants who sold to them – who demanded the trappings of increased wealth – including clocks. At the same time, the industrial revolution brought economic hardship for individual clock makers (10). Of course, clock makers who could no longer compete on their own were logical employees for the new factories.
The competition between the American imports and the German factory clocks was fierce, with the primary focus on style and price. Of necessity, the resultant overriding focus on price resulted in the production of clocks that were, even at the time, decried as “billig und schlecht”, or “cheap and nasty” (13). But, they sold!
This is the environment that fostered the first clock factories in Germany. The 1850’s were a period of hardship and poverty throughout Europe as the enormous transition to industrial production – the “Industrial Revolution” - was in progress (10). The competition from American factories resulted in many of the individual clock-makers in the Black Forest working in German factories (10). It was in this environment that a promoter named Gustav Becker shined.
Viennese Masters and German Factories
The vast majority of the Viennese watch and clock makers did not accept factories, maintaining instead their traditional business practice of individual master clock makers producing clocks in individual shops. Claterbos provides 210 pages of names of Viennese clock makers in his definitive tome on clockmakers in Vienna – “Viennese Clockmakers and What They Left Us”. Gebrueder Resch (Brothers Resch) was the only factory to break from this tradition (see August 2009 Bulletin for more on Gebrueder Resch – reference 11). In comparison, the Vienna-style regulators made in Germany were predominantly made by factories (Kochmann includes 260 pages of trademarks for German clock factories in his “Clock & Watch Trademark Index of European Origin”).
With this historical background, let’s next look at the makers of these two clocks.
