 Welcome to the Society of Antiquities of London for those of you who have not been here to our building before. I'm Heather Rowland and I'm head of the library and museum collections for the society, and so part of my responsibility as part of the museum collections includes our wonderful collection of clocks. Just to say, we are an accredited museum, so we do try to follow best practice and professional guidelines. Before I launch into just giving you a bit of an intro and things, I just want to do a couple of housekeeping things to let you know. We're not expecting a fire drill, so if an arm goes, it's the real thing. And if it goes this morning whilst we're down here on the ground floor, if you can just make your way through the front doors and go and stand by Joshua Reynolds in the courtyard, that would be great. This afternoon we're going to be upstairs on the top floor, which I'll tell you a bit about in a minute. So if your arm goes this afternoon when we're upstairs, if you can just make your way down the stairs and again into the entrance hall and out through the front door to Joshua Reynolds statue, as with all fire drills, the lift will be deactivated so you won't be able to use the lift. So the programme for today is we're going to have session this morning here in the meeting room and we're going to hear Roger and Jonathan talk about the Wally Army Family and the Regulator Clock and the Society of Antiquaries Collection. Matt's going to take us up to about 12.30pm when we'll break for lunch. Lunch will be served in the council room, which is where you got your tea and coffee from this morning. We set aside an hour for lunch up to 1.30pm and then we're going to go up to the top floor where we have our museum room and also we're using the fellows room next door and you can see the conservation which is taking place this week on the Regulator Clock led by Malcolm and we've also put out in the fellows room the Falling Ball Clock which is our other big conservation project which we'll be moving on to after the Regulator Clock and so what we want to do is to split you into two groups 30 minutes each and then swap over. So I suggest probably about 13 in one group and 14 in another group and then we'll try and sort of quickly at the end of the day just convening the fellows room to have sort of a few final comments. You should have a handout which includes a programme for the day and I've also included in it at the back a hand list of the clocks in our collection as well and all the clocks, those that we have in this building, are actually on display so you should be able to spot them as you go around the building and we'll also go and take a look at the Lantern Clock which is in the General Secretary's office because the General Secretary is not here today so that'll be a chance to do that and see it as well. So just a bit of background about our clocks. So Malcolm Archer who many of you know who's been looking after our clocks since around about 2008 and in 2011 he carried out a co-observation assessment for us and since then we've had a regular rolling programme of conservation as well as regular maintenance so Malcolm probably comes in about three or four times a year to come and sort of and if we've got a problem with any of them we shout help and Malcolm assists but like most institutions now we have a very limited resources and budget to be able to carry out any conservation so it's all but routine maintenance and so we have to look for external funding and help for any military conservation work such as the regulator clock and the falling ball clock and so the conservation of both of those wouldn't have been possible without two things first of all the grants we've received for the regulator clock from the Arts Council England Prism Fund which to unwrap what prism is, prism is the preservation of industrial and scientific material fund the Leeds Trust, the Antiquarian Horrological Society and the Wershywall Company of Clockmakers and several individual donors have funded the conservation of the falling ball clock and secondly and equally as importantly we wouldn't be able to do this without the support, expertise and knowledge of the several horologists and specialists within our fellowship most notably Jonathan and Roger who we're very very indebted to for all the support they've been giving and as part of this project we didn't just want to carry out conservation we wanted to share the research and the discoveries that are coming to light as well as a result of this dismantling of the clocks and the study of them and so this study day is very much a part of that and was factored in right from the beginning in our funding application and just to let you know that Jonathan and Roger will be also giving a public lecture here which I think is probably going to be like a say kind of a repeat of this on Tuesday the 16th of May which is the lunchtime lectures which we hold they're completely free so if you want to hear it again or you know of somebody else who might and wants to come back do tell them to look on our and I've put details in the back here about how to book a place I think we've already got about 80 people booked on it so I wouldn't hang around if you do know of somebody who wants to come to it and finally as well as part of the funding we're going to be creating a digital display which will be outside next to the regulator clock when it's fully installed with a touchpad for people to be able to look at and we're also going to be putting digital information on our website and we're also very grateful to Jonathan, Roger and Malcolm for agreeing to be interviewed and chatting about their work throughout this process as well and so you'll be able to see them as well as part of this so without further ado I will hand you over I don't think the three of them need any introduction to you so I'm going to hand over to Roger and I hope you enjoy the day Well good morning everyone as you may have guessed I'm the warm-up act but you've got to sit through this because I think some things which I think are quite important before you actually examine the clock which of course is what you're really here to do so the grand volume regulator of which you've seen the carcass outside in June 1848 the wealthy collector and fellow of this society Octavius Morgan delivered a paper to the society entitled Observations on the History and Progress of the Art of Watchmaking from the earliest period to modern times the lecture was illustrated by watches both from his collection and from that of the London Clockmakers Company a courtesy of the master of the company who at the time was Benjamin Lewis Fully Mae and he of course was clockmaker to Queen Victoria and as it happened a friend of Octavius Morgan this is the redoubtable man the lecture was well received pleased to hear and a few months later Volumi wrote to the society offering them the gray and volumi regulator in the hope he said that it would be preserved as a monument of the talents of the makers for ages to come now parts of that letter are worth quoting more fully he noted that the clock and the pendulum were constructed on Harrison's principles and observed that it was and I quote, too delicate and expensive for general use indeed he doubted whether the performance was as good as one with Graham's escapement and a mercury pendulum but it was nevertheless he said an extremely curious and valuable clock he then moved on to the British clock trade in general noting that the legitimate race of clock and watchmakers passed passing away and will soon merge into the class of the most ordinary manufacturers I should say here manufacturers at that time didn't just mean factory owners, it meant ordinary working men and women no doubt finally he noted the vital importance of accurate timekeeping for British mastery of the seas and trade and he stressed the importance of regulators for adjusting marine chronometers now it's an important letter as far as the history of that clock is concerned because it stressed two aspects of his gift to society one was personal and the other was in a sense national if I start with a personal aspect Williamy was then aged 68 not a very old age some of us might think but he was coming to the end of his working life and he died six years later in 1854 overall it had certainly been a very successful career covering 50 years during which time he'd maintained his firm's reputation as one of the finest clock and watchmakers in Britain with demand for its high quality and it has to be said very expensive products coming from the highest and the wealthiest levels of society from government departments and indeed from Britain's colonies overseas as an individual he'd made valuable technical contributions to British clockmaking especially with his turret clocks which according to his friend the engineer Timothy Brahma son of the founder of that firm were as superior to the ordinary kind as Mountain's gun compared with a Birmingham musket he'd also been a staunch defender of the British clock and watchmaking industry working through the clockmakers company of which he was master on five occasions and he'd been a strong supporter of the company's pioneering steps to establish a museum and a library which would chronicle the early development of the industry by any standard he'd enjoyed enviable social and commercial success but there'd also been some personal disappointments he'd very recently learned that he would not be getting the contract for the very large turret clock for the new houses of parliament for which in fact he'd already prepared designs asked for by the architect Sir Charles Barry the contract instead which would have crowned his career as the leading maker of public clocks in Britain would go to E.J. Dent thanks to what volume he and indeed other London clockmakers regarded as sharp practice by the astronomer Royal George Airey and the wealthy lawyer and polymath Edward Beckett Denison Now Denison was an amateur horologist and while he was undoubtedly touched with genius he was also, according to a modern biographer a man of arrogance and bile and since Volumi himself was a thorough professional both by descent and education and according to his obituary fearless in the expression of his opinion of any deviation from the right path I think you can see it there that much of views between them must have been quite titanic and then a further shadow was cast by Volumi's knowledge that his own firm founded at the start of the 18th century by his great-grandfather Benjamin Gray and at that forefront of British clock and watchmaking for much of those 150 years was coming to an end in itself that wasn't too surprising the family's material success meant that recent generations had drifted away from trade even at Volumi's exalted level towards more gentlemanly professions as merchants, architects and bankers and although Benjamin Lewis had several brothers and two sons none of them had any share in the business I'm afraid his own domineering personality bore some responsibility for that when he took over the firm after his father's death in 1811 his next brother, Justin Theodore, had joined him but after 10 years he'd had enough complaining that he was being treated just like a sleeping partner and since he was too enterprising to accept such a support knit position Justin Theodore left the partnership and moved to France where he established a very successful business manufacturing worsted cloth Volumi can't really be blamed for not bringing his own sons into the business as the 19th century developed it had become increasingly clear that British clock and watchmaking at least in the form valued by traditional producers was in terminal decline thanks to the challenge of cheaper mechanised production in Switzerland, France and later in America as a leading member of the clock maker's company Volumi had for many years been pressing the government to protect the British industry by maintaining high import duties on foreign clocks and watches but it proved almost impossible to prevent the massive smuggling that resulted and in any case by the 1840s political opinion in Britain was swinging firmly behind allowing free trade in manufactured goods which of course benefitted Britain's factory based manufacturers but was disastrous for older industries in the light clock and watchmaking which are still relied on traditional craft practices it was with this depressing outlook for both his own firm and for the wider British industry that Volumi gave the regulator to the society in 1848 and the falling ball clock in 1850 although the immediate stimulus had come from Octavius Morgan it's clear that Volumi seized the chance to ensure that the past triumphs of British horology and of his own family in particular would be remembered and remembered not just by members of his own profession I've already mentioned that he'd been active in building up the museum of the clock maker's company and he would leave it the portraits of his ancestors in due course you'll see some of them later on the other hand he had left or he would leave his extensive horological library to the institution of civil engineers of which he was an associate member on the very reasonable grounds that to leave it to the company would simply duplicate far too many of the books but both of those recipients of course were professional bodies who might be expected to value reminders of their own past in deciding to donate two clocks to the antiquaries a body with much wider historical interests and it should be said at the time much better social connections Volumi was making a more general claim for the importance of horological history to Britain's past now as for why Volumi chose these two clocks in particular the regulator and the globe clock I can say very little in fact about the French made globe clock except that from his letter to the society he saw it as an antiquarian object of great curiosity and considerable rarity however the regulator which he gave two years earlier was clearly a very different matter it carried strong family and even national associations and by the 1840s when he gave the clock the Volumi firm was no longer specially associated with the very high precision horology used for astronomy or navigation it had of course produced many fine regulators over the years using Graham's deadbeat escapement and it adopted the half deadbeat escapement for its other domestic clocks but successive heads of the firm had concentrated mainly on other products Graham Justin Volumi on high quality but essentially conventional watches Benjamin Volumi on ornamental clocks to rival the very fashionable products of Paris and Benjamin Lewis himself on public clocks however there had been a period in the second half of the 18th century when the firm had produced some very interesting precision clocks for George III including regulators used at the Royal Observatory at Cure and at this point I think a short explanation of the firm's links with the crown might be useful from the mid 18th century the family's business was located at 68 MPH which is that one that has a roof but you can't quite see it very close as you can see to St James's Palace couldn't be closer really and just as a matter of interest this was the carriage entrance to Malbra House so I always like to say that that's not Malbra House but you go around behind Volumi's shop and there it is as I said this today I'd rather like to say that Duke of Malbra lived at the bottom of Volumi's garden which is true but perhaps not seen at the time and of course Duke of Malbra was also a very great client of Volumi there had been an earlier shop but it was very nearby in Lower St James's Street equally near St James's Palace gate which had been owned by the firm's founder this man Benjamin Gray he'd been appointed watchmaker a stress watchmaker to George II in 1742 and he'd retained that post until that king died in 1760 Gray took his son-in-law the Swiss immigrant Justin Volumi as partner and into the business in the year before he became king's watchmaker and although Gray remained the senior partner in the firm until his own death in 1764 Justin Volumi this man, sorry this man effectively ran the business from Paul Maugh for the last 10 years now unlike Gray and contrary to what a lot of sources will tell you Volumi, this Volumi never held a royal warrant probably I think because he was ineligible because he never took out naturalisation and remained a staunch Swiss immigrant but he did establish close links to the new king George III who, like many enlightenment rulers was genuinely interested in horology and he received an honorary appointment to George's queen, Queen Charlotte Justin was subsequently joined by his elder son Benjamin who, Benjamin who in 1772 was appointed clockmaker but is a different position to King George III in 1797 when Justin died Benjamin became head of the firm and he very soon was joined by his eldest son Benjamin Lewis probably in 1800 when Benjamin Lewis was 20 and it was Benjamin Lewis who took over on Benjamin's death in 1811 when he also succeeded as royal clockmaker first to George III then to the regent then George IV, William IV and finally Queen Victoria now it was during the last years of the Gray and Volumi partnership in the late 1750s when Justin Volumi was certainly in charge of the firm that it first took an interest in high precision clocks and that interest was further stimulated a few years later by George III's decision to establish a private observatory at Q in time to view the 1769 transit of Venus this was built to the designs of Sir William Chambers and this is a picture of it today to equip the observatory the king is said to have procured the best clocks and watches that could be made very sadly there's no record of those purchases in the Royal Archives but we do know that there was a regulator and an astronomer's follower clock supplied by Volumi and used for the transit observations and both Justin and Benjamin, his young son attended the royal party to assist with timing those observations the follower clock supplied for Q still survives and it's now in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich it's signed by Justin Volumi alone as you will see confirming that it was made no earlier than 1764 and it uses Harrison's anti-friction wheels on some of the pivots unfortunately it's much less easy to identify the regulator which was also supplied in 1769 there is an obvious candidate and that's an 18th century regulator signed by Benjamin Volumi which was certainly at the Q Observatory later in the 18th century and is now in the Science Museum though without its case that is a picture taken by Jonathan recently which shows it as it's now displayed that's an old picture showing it in the case that it had and still I think they still have at the Science Museum though how old that case is I don't know and that's a picture of the backplate showing the anti-friction wheels as you can see it has all the Harrisonian features anti-friction wheels, cross-upper escapement and indeed a grid iron pendulum though of the later five bar zinc and steel form used by several makers from the 1780s onwards rather than Harrison's own original nine bar form though that could of course be a later replacement however there are still reasons for thinking that this was not the regulator used at Q in 1769 we know a little more about this particular clock when the Q Observatory was closed and its instruments dispersed in 1841 the regulator was taken by the Duke of Sussex I stressed taken because it's not clear that he had any right to do so but he was a younger son of George III who shared his father's interest in clocks it was then sold just two years later when the Duke died to pay off his very considerable debts and at that time it was said to have been made in AD 1785 the AD is in the catalogue entry though the source of the information unfortunately isn't given and BL Volumie bought it for 50 guineas noting elsewhere that the clock had been made for George III by his father, that's Benjamin Volumie who always considered it the best he ever made having discussed the technical evidence with Jonathan and looked again at the documentary evidence I've come to the view that the data 1785 is unlikely I do that reluctantly, I don't like throwing away dates which are presented to me on a plate but I don't think it's true in this case as it happens we know quite a lot about what Benjamin Volumie was doing at that time since this was exactly the period when he was very busy developing his new range of sculptural clocks which involved using Derby biscuit porcelin figures as you can see here and he was in constant communication with the Derby porcelin factory over this and taking great pains to get everything exactly right and it seems highly unlikely to me that he was simultaneously engaged in the very different work of constructing an astronomical regulator for Q this clock by the way is also dated 1785 so exactly the period at which allegedly the Q clock was made so we have to think of alternatives and let me suggest a possible sequence of events when Justin Volumie was asked to provide a follower clock and a regulator for the Kingsley Observatory in 1769 he made a new follower clock which is signed with his name like almost all of the firm's clocks from 1764 to the early 1780s however for the regulator I suggest that he probably supplied perhaps on loan the Graham Volumie clock now owned by the society as it would be noted later when this was first made some years earlier it had been fitted with a standard Graham deadbeat escapement but this was later changed through the Grasshopper escapement derived from Harrison the date of this very important modification is unfortunately not known but it could well have been done in time for the transit observations in 1769 the alteration might well have been a natural development of Justin's existing interest in Harrison's inventions as shown by the other features of the regulator clock or it could even have been suggested by the King himself who was already sympathetic to Harrison in this period in any case it's my view that much of the work was done by the young of the modification was done by the young Benjamin Volumie who is now coming to the end of his technical training at the age of 21 now as I've said both Justin and Benjamin were present during the transit observations and one can imagine perhaps the King subsequently commissioning them after the satisfaction of the observations to produce a very similar regulator but with the new escapement for the observatory from a start what is clear is that the maker of the new clock was certainly Benjamin Volumie who very unusually signed it himself not a signature I've seen on any of the clock by him and was later to think of it as the finest clock he had ever made indeed I suspect he may even have seen it as his masterpiece in traditional craft terms although he was never formally apprenticed so he never had to deliver such a thing it was probably completed by 1772 and it may be no coincidence that it was in that precise year that Benjamin was appointed King's clock maker in succession to the great John Ellicott a remarkable achievement for someone still only 25 years old even if it also recognised the contributions of his father now soon after in fact in the following year the King commissioned the Volumies to produce another regulator but for domestic use at the Queen's house now at Buckingham Palace and I imagine the King also specified or agreed to a grasshopper escapement again now this was a domestic clock essentially and therefore rather a simpler clock in some ways without anti-friction wheels but at least not to the train but it did have a nine bar pendulum and the opportunity was taken to try out a variant of the grasshopper escapement using two sets of grasshoppers it was delivered in 1776 and these dates are firm signed by Volumian Sun which indicates the partnership recently formed between Justin and Benjamin and it's now in the British Museum on loan from the Royal Collection now at this stage all I've said is just a hypothesis but if the regulator used a cue in 1769 was indeed to society's clock it raises some interesting problems Jonathan I think will be describing well indeed I know you'll be describing the technical features of the clock in some detail and will no doubt explain how the Volumies alone amongst Harrison's London contemporaries were inspired to take up the grasshopper escapement and his other inventions I would merely note here that while the movement of the Graham Volumie clock is very similar to the clock in the Science Museum the signature on the dial, the Graham Volumie signature shows that it must have been made before 1764 the style of the Walnut case indeed the fact that it's in Walnut also suggests the date in the 1750s or at the very latest of the early 1760s many years before there were preparations being made for the building of Q Observatory and finally as I've already mentioned the work carried out by Malcolm has revealed that the present escapement is a replacement presumably for a Graham deadbeat and one indication is that the escapement and the pendulum have had to be placed off-center and if you look there you will see this is at rest and you will see it's no longer central and another indication is that this is seen straight on but the two cheeks taking the wider swing of the grasshopper escapement are of different size it's not an optical illusion that's true and you can see it when you look outside in the case the subsequent history of the society's clock is very soon told since we have almost no information about what happened to it following its presumed loan to the Q Observatory in 1769 it presumably returned to Palmisle once the observatory's new regulator was finished and thereafter I've only found a single reference to it before Benjamin Lewis Fully-Me gave it to the society in 1846 and that was simply that in 1811 it's recorded as having been cleaned and the dial resilvered with the costs being charged to Benjamin Fully-Me who was still ahead of the firm at the time so it was evidently still owned by the family I think it was probably kept in the shop in Palmisle but given its very fine case and its glass panels probably I think in the nut stairs room where he entertained his rather grander customers rather than in the workshop however if we've got very little direct evidence about this clock we do know a little more about the very similar clock made at Q and it's worth talking about that a bit because it helps to explain why the three volumee grasshopper regulators two made for the king one retained in house did not become the pattern for the firm's later clocks which reverted to the standard Graham deadby you'll recall that Benjamin was said to have regarded the Q clock as the best he has ever made however the complicated construction of these clocks meant that they were not just difficult to make but also a very real problem to maintain when Benjamin Lewis had to clean it in 1814 he noted that it was and I quote, very troublesome to take to pieces and when he worked on it again in the following year making the holes in the plates to see the action of the escapement he complained that this clock is extremely complicated and very difficult to assemble I'm sure Malcolm will endorse those views and comments like this explain just why volumee's letter to the society had said that while it was an extremely curious and valuable clock the design was too delicate and expensive for general use clearly it would only be commercially viable if it could show significant improvements over existing regulators and in volumee's opinion it had failed to do so that was indeed the opinion of all leading horologists at the time and it remained so until very recently as Jonathan will no doubt now explain thank you okay, good morning everybody can everybody hear me okay as you've heard from Roger we're looking at the society's clock in the context of the two other known volumee regulators with anti-friction work and with grasshopper escapement even a brief look at the movements of these clocks tells us that there's a strong connection between all three and the work of the great precision clock pioneer John Harrison I think that's not where I want to be I think we're still at the end where's Heather gone we need to go back somehow preferably without showing everyone all my slides can I right click on this if I right click on this an end show go to end show there you are and then go to the top then ah, so that should be your first one and then it should go to and then if you go to slideshow from beginning okay, sorry about that see if that works okay, we're off okay, so this paper then first of all takes a brief technical look at Harrison's precision pendulum clocks to consider the similarities and the possible links with the volumee grasshopper regulator and to emphasise importantly the historical importance of the society's clock outside the door here I'll be trying to explain some of the technicalities in relatively simple terms for the one or two people here today who are not horologists so forgive me horologists if I'm teaching my grandmother suck eggs so to speak if I don't make it simple enough for the others then I apologise too it's very difficult to strike a balance here John Harrison is of course famous for the creation of the extraordinary series of large prototype marine timekeepers and the first workable version known today as H4 and for gaining some of the great longitude reward offered by the government for a solution to the longitude problem famous as John Harrison is for his marine timekeepers what's less well known is that throughout his professional life Harrison was also constantly developing his ideas on the optimum type of fixed precision pendulum clocks ideas which began in the early 1720s and were very different indeed from the established norm following the seminal work of the great Dutch scientist Christian Huygens in the creation of the first practical pendulum clock in the mid 1650s the work of the London clockmaker Thomas Tompian and Richard Townley in the 1670s and Tompian's successor George Graham in the 1720s the precision pendulum clock design had developed by the first quarter of the 18th century into what became the standard type known as a regulator Huygens had shown both practically and mathematically that the pendulum was not a perfect timekeeper Huygens realised that the swings of a pendulum were not isochronous that is to say the times of the swing varied depending on the extent of the swing as the swing increased so the time of swing slowed this inequality is known as circular deviation or circular error sometimes and in the 1650s Huygens designed a means of compensating for it by hanging the pendulum on a silk thread which was suspended between what were called suspension cheeks so here with these cheeks present if the pendulum swing increased the suspension would wrap further round the cheeks shortening the effective length of the pendulum and compensating for circular deviation it was a good idea in theory but in practice the instability of the silk suspension meant that the timekeeping was not really improved by this device and the use of suspension cheeks gradually disappeared in continental clocks and was never generally adopted in English made pendulum clocks it was soon recognised that a way round the problem of lack of isopronism was to restrict the swings of the pendulum to very small arcs where any changes in arc will cause less change in rate and by fitting a large heavy pendulum bob with much greater mass which would tend to smooth out any great changes over the longer term in the 1720s George Graham had introduced another refinement in the form of a pendulum which self-compensated for temperature change using the principle of differential expansion Graham employed a jar of mercury as a pendulum bob seen behind him here in portrait independently in the same period John Harrison designed the now familiar form of gridiron pendulum also seen in his portrait using a rod in the form of a grid of brass and steel also featured in his portrait and it was Harrison's gridiron compensation which would become the favoured type during the 18th century By the 1730s then there was an accepted standard for a precision pendulum clock the regulator The clock had the type of escapement invented by Tompian known as the dead beat escapement in which the escape wheel and seconds hand advanced in dead steps without recoiling it every swing as earlier escapements had and the pendulum had a large heavy bob swinging through a small arc usually less than 3 degrees Such a clock seen here in an example by Graham on the right is just about capable of timekeeping consistently to within a few seconds a week but generally not better than that This was the type of regulator which has always been considered the best and which I and my contemporaries as horological students in the early 1970s were still being taught to revere as the best standard dart design for a regulator Although Harrison's gridiron pendulum was generally adopted in every other respect Harrison's pendulum clock design this is the 1726 example seen here was different from the established form and was regarded with great scepticism by the professionals In Harrison's regulator design introduced by him in the mid 1720s the pendulum has a relatively light bob of just over a few pounds weight and swings through an enormous arc of over 12 degrees The escapement is not a deadbeat but deliberately incorporates recoil into the design totally at odds with conventional thinking The escapement employed by Harrison was one of his own design known as the grasshopper escapement as you've heard from Roger owing to the kicking action of its pallets This escapement and indeed the whole movement of Harrison's clocks had a particular advantage in that they required no lubrication whatever by the extensive use of anti-friction devices Conventional regulator designs all relied on having their bearings lubricated and this invariably introduced instabilities in performance once the oil started to deteriorate which could easily occur within weeks with 18th century lubrication Harrison's clocks also employ Huygens type suspension cheeks on the pendulum's suspension but Harrison used a metal suspension spring and his design is much more effective than the Huygens type had been In his writings Harrison tells us that he was astonished when he first saw Graham's deadbeat escapement Although he and Graham were good friends Harrison stated that his first impression on seeing the deadbeat escapement was that either Mr Graham had taken leave of his senses or I had Harrison claimed for his 1720s regulators the extraordinary performance of plus or minus one second in a month a claim which over the years some virologists have taken with a pinch of salt given the peculiarity of Harrison's design It was however the design he used at least in the early years for rating his prototype marine timekeepers so it must have served him well enough However, by the 1740s Harrison was beginning to think of further improvements to his pendulum clocks and amongst other work started constructing what we know today as the Royal Astronomical Society Regulator It's known as that because that august organisation just through that wall there is the organisation that now owns that clock although it's currently on display at Greenwich Today there is only the movement of the clock and as far as is known the original pendulum and any case it might have had has not survived The clock movement of the RAS clock which consists of nearly 900 parts is principally made in brass and bronze alloys As with Harrison's earlier clocks this regulator has its pendulum suspended between cheeks You can see here the pendulum suspension cheeks and this aids isopronism in the pendulum swings The clock also incorporates Harrison's brass hopper esgatement which you can see here and runs entirely without adaglubrication again by using extensive anti-friction rolls which had their centre bearings importantly had their centre bearings made of a naturally waxy hardwood lignum vitae and they were running on fixed brass pins so the anti-friction wheels needed no extra lubrication on their pivots The RAS regulator also incorporates a device known as a remontoire which ensures a very uniform drive to the esgatement which is a critically important feature of Harrison's design However as far as we know Harrison's work on marine timekeepers prevented him from making the progress needed on this pendulum clock and it was never finally completed and adjusted Nevertheless, in his last book published in 1775 just one year before he died Harrison stated of this clock There is more reason it shall perform to a second in 100 days than Mr Graham should perform to a second in one This suggestion of a performance of one second in 100 days has always been the subject of debate It goes far beyond anything achieved with a pendulum clock until the electromechanical regulator is made in the 20th century As can be imagined this last publication of Harrison's which is seen here caused considerable consternation among his contemporaries By this time, Harrison's writing style which had always been quite difficult to follow had become almost impossible to understand Most commentators have dismissed this late work as either simply Harrison being confused or deliberately incomprehensible The book was reviewed at the same time and the reviewer was on compromising If you're of a nervous disposition you better put fingers in your ears now but if you're writing a review for a book then you might want to take notes because this is quite a humding of this one We are obliged to declare this book one of the most unaccountable productions we've ever met with Every page of this performance bears marks of incoherence and absurdity little short of the symptoms of insanity Mr Harrison is doubtless a good mechanic and merits the reward which has been paid to his ingenuity but the extravagance of his self-conceit and total want of urbanity towards several of the first mathematicians and mechanics of the age can be excused only by the debility of superannuated dotage How about that for a dismissal? In fact, although Harrison's book can hardly be described as easy reading careful and patient study has enabled Harrison researchers to translate some of the terminology and contorted style and it has been possible to understand much of what he's trying to say at the time it should be possible to attempt a sort of translation of the full work engine course but with such condemnation by respected academics no interest seems to have been taken in this work of Harrison's at the time except as has been observed that the volume is with the three clocks under discussion here seemed to have experimented with Harrison's pendulum clock designs and were evidently interested in exploring their capabilities more will be said about this in a minute but in spite of this tentative interest shown by the volume is following Harrison's death his pendulum clock technology was largely ignored and then forgotten the RAS clock itself ended up in the collections of the Royal Astronomical Society next door virtually as a curiosity the clock was repaired and described by various authors in the first half of the 20th century but no serious interest was taken in Harrison's pendulum clock theories until the 1970s when a small group of specialists began looking again at Harrison's writing and studying the surviving hardware the results of this research over the last almost 50 years is too involved to discuss in detail here but suffice to say we have now formed a very different and for some of us a very exciting new opinion of Harrison's pendulum clock system perhaps we can discuss that later if people would like to know more this clock made by Martin Burgess and on test in the horology workshop at Greenwich for over three years now may not look much like Harrison's as it's all constructed in modern materials but in essence it's of Harrison's revolutionary design and has been truly astonishing in its timekeeping performance in over two years it's error varied by just two seconds coming back to zero at the end of that whole period and making the Guinness World Records for its performance so after nearly three centuries we're beginning to realise that Harrison's pendulum technology was based on sound thinking after all and could have provided a time standard in the 18th century way beyond anything available until the 1920s in addition to tests on the Burgess clock a team from the British Horological Institute and the exact replicas of the RAS clock to establish the potential for the clock in its original form the research has been ground-baking and exciting stuff naturally it increases our interest in any attempts that Harrison's contemporaries made to try his system which brings us back to the three regulators with grasshopper escapements and anti-friction work by the volumeies of the Society's clock signed by Benjamin Gray and Justin Vulliamy Roger has discussed the likely lineage of these three clocks and I think given the few facts we can be certain of Roger and I agree that the Society's clock is most likely to be the first of the three with the walnut veneered case and probably the basic movement dating from around 1760 give or take As Roger has mentioned we know from evidence in the movement that the escapement of this clock was originally a more conventional dead bead but that it was from the beginning designed to incorporate extensive anti-friction work in the same vein as Harrison's work and was surely inspired by a knowledge of his marine timekeepers and probably some knowledge of his precision pendulum clocks Having said that the clock did not employ Harrison's suspension cheeks on the pendulum nor did it ever have a remantoir to provide constant drive to the escapement and as can be seen Vulliamy could also not resist giving the pendulum an enormously large and heavy pendulum bob At some stage after its construction the clock resulted to have a form of brass hopper escapement similar but not identical to Harrison's pendulum clock escapement As you heard from Roger this necessitated the fitting of boxes or cheeks on the sides of the case to accommodate the larger arc of swing and the shifting of the suspension point of the pendulum across to the right As Roger has pointed out therefore you can see quite clearly that it is asymmetric in its positioning So where then did Justin Vulliamy get his information about Harrison's work Well, there are likely to be several sources of this knowledge In 1749 Harrison had been awarded the Royal Society's Copley Medal for his work on his maroon timekeepers and quite detailed descriptions of his timekeepers and clocks were read out by the president Martin Fox thereafter becoming public knowledge In addition and contrary to popular belief Harrison was quite happy at various times to show his clocks to visitors coming to his house and we know that many clockmakers and scientific gentlemen visited when the opportunity arose Harrison's pioneering and extensive use of anti-friction devices throughout these timekeepers was thus well known right from the 1730s and his grasshopper escapement would have been known of if not in great detail Further it would seem that Justin Vulliamy was considered trustworthy by Harrison as he was accepted as a possible witness in the revelation of the design of Harrison's successful longitude timekeeper H4 in 1765 and the two men may well have met by this time but obviously we have no absolute proof of that Justin Vulliamy evidently appreciated the value of anti-friction wheels in increasing the efficiency of bearings as a few years later in 1768 he fitted such devices to his top quality wheel barometer in this fabulous Chippendale case made for Sir Roland Winn at Nostal Priory which is coincidentally the estate where Harrison had been born of course and what a fabulous thing that is As for when the society's clock was converted to grasshopper escapement Roger has proposed what seems a very likely scenario in that the clock already having its anti-friction work then got upgraded by Justin and perhaps also his son Benjamin with the extra Harrison feature in preparation for the clock's use at the Royal Observatory in Cew for observing the astronomical event known as the Transitive Venus in 1769 Doing this conversion whoever carried out the work would have needed at least some idea of how the escapement should be constructed because this is totally different from anything most clockmakers would have ever encountered before and it's interesting that the design chosen was to have both pallets coaxial that is to say as in Harrison's escapement here with both pallets on the same pivot this was not necessarily the most obvious form when some years later Harrison's escapement was drawn for illustration in various encyclopedias this detail was still not fully understood and the incorrect drawing seen on the right here is what was genuinely understood to be the correct form and which has misled clockmakers and scholars ever since volume is knowledge of something like the correct form is perhaps some slight further evidence that he was either in touch with Harrison or had seen Harrison's clock escapement with his own eyes Roger has proposed a likely scenario for the creation of the second and third clocks which again seems logical and plausible to me the society's clock was effectively a prototype loaned to the king for the observations at Q in 1769 following which the clock known today is the Q clock now on loaned to the science museum was commissioned by the king for his observatory and was made based on a very similar movement to the first clock including a complete series of anti-friction wheels for the train for reasons I'll mention in a moment it seems likely that both these clocks did not perform significantly better than a standard Graham regulator so when the king decided to commission a third clock from Benjamin Vulliamy in 1773 Benjamin decided to try a different form of grasshopper escapement with pallets separately pivoted on opposite sides of the escape wheel as far as is known this is an arrangement for a grasshopper escapement unique to Benjamin Vulliamy though it is reminiscent of the escapement fitted to Harrison's balance controlled marine timekeepers and perhaps Benjamin had these in mind when constructing this clock in which case he would have adapted the marine timekeeper escapement to work with a pendulum rather than balances it seems in the case of this third clock that Vulliamy had decided the mass of anti-friction work was frankly not worth all the trouble and expense and the train of this clock is much more conventional with pivots running in plain lubricated holes and of course this was a clock for domestic use by the royal family rather than a precision regulator so that may well also have informed his decision but as you can see it's much more empty inside than the other clocks as Roger told us earlier Benjamin Vulliamy concluded of these clocks that in the end they didn't actually perform any better than a good grey and dead beat and that the extra complications were indeed not worth the trouble Vulliamy's conclusions require a final comment therefore having studied Harrison's original design in depth and having now had the chance to look at all three Vulliamy clocks the reasons for Vulliamy's pessimistic conclusions is clear in order to succeed with John Harrison's pendulum clock designs one has to understand that Harrison's system is effectively a recipe not a menu from which one can select items which appeal to you with Harrison it's all or nothing the Vulliamy has chose to use a Harrison type gridiron compensation pendulum which was good but chose to fit a large heavy bob to it which is entirely counter to Harrison's design they fitted a kind of grasshopper which was similar to Harrison's but evidently they didn't realise that it was essential that the proportions of this escapement were correct and the differences are simply too great but there were even more important and fatal differences in the designs than these for Harrison's system to provide the stability to keep time within one second in a hundred days the clock must have the suspension cheeks acting on the pendulum suspension the movement must have the remandoir to ensure a constant delivery of power to the escapement neither of which volume his clocks had and even the extensive anti-friction work was flawed in its design in these clocks the anti-friction wheels themselves were excellent and the train wheel pivots rolled beautifully upon them however those anti-friction wheels also have pivots and there are steel running in brass holes and whereas Harrison's were running oil free with lignum, vitie and brass, Volumie's anti-friction wheel pivots needed oiling so although the friction was much reduced long term stability would be affected when the oil on those pivots deteriorated it's hardly surprising then that these imposing clocks produced by the Volumie's did not perform nearly well enough to achieve Harrison's claims and it's a sad irony it might just be the Volumie's and their conclusions about Harrison's pendulum clock designs that was the final nail in the coffin and was partly responsible for the design being forgotten during the 18th and 19th centuries I shall leave it at that thank you very much