History of the American Clock Business

History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years, and Life of Chauncey Jerome, was written by Chauncey Jerome and first published in 1860. Jerome, who lived from 1793 to 1868, was one of the most important figures in the development of the American clock manufacturing industry during the first half of the nineteenth century and one of the principal innovators of the methods by which American clocks became one of the major American manufactured exports of the period.

The book combines two distinct narratives. The first is Jerome’s account of the broader American clock industry as he had observed and participated in its development across his long working life, with attention to the various manufacturing methods, technological innovations, business arrangements, and individual figures who had shaped the industry from the late eighteenth century craftsman shop tradition through to the substantial factory production of the mid nineteenth century. The second narrative is Jerome’s personal autobiography, recounting his own career from his apprenticeship as a young man through his various business successes and his eventual financial collapse in the 1850s after a complicated partnership arrangement went disastrously wrong.

The American clock industry that Jerome helped create was one of the early American success stories in the international manufactured goods trade. American manufacturers developed methods for producing reliable inexpensive clocks at substantially lower cost than the European clockmakers could match, and the American clocks became one of the major American export products to Britain, continental Europe, and various other markets during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Jerome was personally responsible for several of the key innovations that made this possible, including the development of the inexpensive brass movement that replaced the older wooden movements and that gave American clocks substantial advantages in durability and reliability.

The autobiographical sections are written with the kind of direct unornamented prose that the mid nineteenth century American business autobiography tradition favoured. Jerome’s account of his financial collapse is particularly honest and painful, with substantial detail about how the trust he had placed in his partners had been abused and about the consequences for his own family and community.

The book is essential reading for historians of American manufacturing, of the early American industrial revolution, and of the specific clock industry. It pairs naturally with the various subsequent histories of American horology.