On the cover of the Saturday Evening Post for November 3, 1945, Norman Rockwell painted an elderly man setting a clock. The man is on a ladder, peering at a pocket watch held in one hand, using the other to move the hour hand of a great street clock, the
I. In the summer of 1633, the French army completed its occupation of the Duchy of Lorraine. It had been coming for two years. This was Cardinal Richelieu's methodical dismemberment of the last substantial buffer state on France's northeastern border. Richelieu acted with the administrative patience
Robert MacCracken Olmsted and the Custodianship of Complicated Time Robert MacCracken Olmsted wound his clocks and watches every Monday evening. Eighty pieces, beginning to end, a ritual that consumed most of the night. He had been doing it since his student days at Princeton in the early 1960s, and he
Department of Historical Archives
How Pierre Le Roy’s design, a marquis’s ship, and two sealed watches shaped the modern marine chronometer... and why almost no one remembers it. There is a story most readers of horological history know. A Yorkshire carpenter's son, largely self-educated, consumed four decades of his life