French Mystery

In our last episode I told the tale of the lovely dial on our Japy Freres. But I jumped over the removal of the dial from the movement and skipped another charming and intriguing piece of its history and an instigator of quite a bit of mystery to your correspondent.

[Queue the Scooby Doo music]

You may recall that in the photo below the movement is on the right (all the gears and such between those thick brass plates) and the bezel, dial and glass door are all on the larger unit on the left. That unit is held to the movement by three posts that pin to the brass plate of the movement. 

When those posts are unpinned and removed from the movement the back of unit looks like this:

That post is on a circular mounting plate that holds the dial in place against the bezel and the glass door. Note the blue enameled back of the dial with the hour and minute wheel still attached through the dial to the hands in the front (which you would see were we to flip over the dial). 

When disassembled the unit looks like this:

Why am I sharing all of these details?

The mounting plate is signed and dated. Here it is still in the unit before I disassembled it:

And here is a clearer (and cleaner) look. It was signed right by that post I highlighted and the date is 6/71:

Monsieur Seebold I presume?

Here's another nice view of the after I cleaned the unit, ready to go back together.

OK if you haven't guessed it already here's the mystery:

This might be the signature of the clockmaker and the date of manufacture, June 1871. 

Or maybe not.

It could also be the date that a cleaning/repair was done and signed by a clockmaker doing that work. Signing movements with dates is often done by clockmakers doing repairs. 

Clock trivia: It turns out that in the standard vernacular for us horologists anyone builds or who works on or repairs clocks... all are referred to as "clockmakers" not clock-repairers-diddlers or whatever.

Turns out I'm a clockmaker. Who knew?

Back to our mystery.

If it's a signature of a clockmaker doing repairs it's pretty large. Usually those doing repairs sign their work a bit more discretely but that's not always true.

If it's the original clockmaker then the date is roughly 15-20 years later than what is thought to be end of the era of the use of silk suspensions in French clocks. As I pointed out in one of my Jules Rolez posts, the Brocot suspension had started to take the whole industry by storm in the 1850's.

Yet we know for sure the clock was made sometime after 1855 as you will recall from an earlier post that this clock has a Japy Freres makers mark of 1855. So it had to be made on (unlikely) or in the years following the date on the makers mark.

That mark was made when Japy Freres won the Grand Medal of Honor at the Universal Exposition in Paris. It was a big deal. It was their first Paris expo win. They stamped lots of movements with this stamp after that date for many years, proudly displaying the win. So if this clock was made in 1871 with an 1855 makers stamp... not that far-fetched but I still would have guessed that stamp was used for only 5-10 years after the medal win.

Was this made like a retro thing? Old school?

Did they just have some extra silk suspension movements still laying about in 1871?

Some additional research on Japy Freres makers marks and low and behold there's a different Grand Medal winner mark from 1867! 

It has no 1867 date stamped on it but I found several examples of it and only one example where a photo of that mark was listed by the award notice. 

I pulled out Thorpe's book and sure enough in the appendices I see that Japy Freres won that same Grand Medal of Honor in 1867.

Rah ha!

What is it Scoob?

Rawr-rawr-rar-rar-rahr-rah!

It was the old-innkeeper!

Ahem...

My assumption is that a clock ostensibly made in 1871 would not display a Grand Medal stamp from the 1855 win but would go with the much more recent one from 1867.

Je le penserais.

Thus I now deduce that the signature is from a clockmaker doing a cleaning/repair.

Everyone back in the Mystery Machine!

So when was this clock made!?

I'm still guessing late 1850's.

I think I'll need to pose this to the NAWCC hive.

To be continued...