Early American Clockmakers: Exporting OG Clocks

Video Transcript

We're not done talking about OG clocks because they're important for another reason. The wooden works clocks even though we could make them cheaply we couldn't export them very successfully. Once you put a wooden works clock on a boat going to England or going anywhere else, that wood wheel is going to swell and those clocks probably wouldn't work by the time they got to where ever they were going. Brass clocks on the other hand easy to export. They're probably going to run fine when they get there. Chance Jerome had the idea of trying to export these to England. England clearly had its own very large important clock making industry but they weren't very good at making inexpensive clocks. You could get great clocks in England but they were expensive and a lot of lower or middle class people couldn't afford clocks. Chance Jerome saw that as a business opportunity and he began exporting OG clocks to England. England at the time was worried as the other countries are and have been about dumping, exports hurting domestic industries and obviously the English clock makers weren't happy about imported OG clocks. The way the English dealt with this was by seizing the imports, assuming that they were being dumped and that they were being sold under the cost of production. So Chance Jerome just sent a boat load over, claimed that the clocks, that he was going to sell them for 3 bucks. The English said you must be selling these for under cost, we're seizing the whole load and paying you the 3 bucks each. Cost him about 2 dollars each to make them so he was happy, sent another boat load that got seized, he made a dollar a clock. By the third boat load the English figures out that maybe he wasn't dumping these and that explains why in England even today there's a lot of OG clocks. If you go to boot fairs and antique shows in England you'll likely see a number of American OG clocks. There are also a number of, number of books on this subject as well but here these two are really a book by Chance Jerome about his, about his years as a clock maker and book about Chance Jerome by Chris Bailey who is one of the countries experts really on American clocks, who's the curator down in a museum down in Connecticut that we'll talk about later.

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