The Ingraham Clock - Part One

My son Aaron gave me an old, broken clock for Christmas. He knew I’d love it. It was made by the E. Ingraham clock company, one of the larger clock making companies back when making watches and clocks was skilled work employing thousands of people. It’s a style known as a tambour mantel clock (tambour means little drum in French). I believe the case is made of mahogany. These things decorated millions of our grandparents’ and great grandparents’ fireplace mantels in the early to middle 20th century, which means eventually it will fit right in at the Farmhouse. My goal is to figure out exactly how old it is, and more importantly, to restore it. This will be my first foray into stripping, cleaning, and reassembling a complete mechanical clockworks. I also plan to refinish the case, which I know is a big no-no when it comes to antique collectibles, but the finish is pretty ugly right now, and I guess I can do what I want, right? I’ve never understood the hesitation over refinishing something really old, unless it was made by Ethan Allen himself.

It’s fair to say I have a thing for clocks and watches. There are thirteen clocks in my study, five of which currently are more or less in agreement about what time it is. Of the others, three haven’t been wound in a while, and five are those really small brass collectible clocks that reside in a bookshelf display case and haven’t had the batteries changed in years. So that’s a pretty normal number of actual working clocks, I think. They aren’t all mechanical; one clock is a set of six tiny video screens meant to look like those old incandescent nixie tubes, though I have reprogrammed it to tell time using Lhosan numbers. What are Lhosan numbers, you ask? Why, have I told you about my most recent book?...

I suppose I am a bit obsessed with clocks, but I never really thought I was obsessed with time itself until Brenda noted how often I will talk about things in relation to their time in the past or their time in the future. Where she might reminisce about an enjoyable vacation with friends or family, I’m more likely to talk about it in terms of “exactly one week ago we were sitting on the plane.” It’s odd, now that I think about it, but it’s something I definitely do. If I’m driving, I’m probably constantly calculating our ETA, or pointing out some banal roadside feature as “the halfway point.” For me, the time associated with something is as important a value as, say, its color or shape or cultural meaning.

And now I’m thinking other thoughts about time, but maybe I’ll save them for another ti…post.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the time it will take to restore this old clock. If I can get the clockworks apart and back together, it will be a genuine accomplishment. In the meantime, an hour or two spent mindlessly sanding something restores my peace of mind as much as it restores the piece of wood.