My granduncle had an old house in our hometown. I can’t say I grew up there, but I practically spent all my summers at his place. It was a big place with a large living room and glass doors and large windows all around. It was not really an old house. At least not when you compare it with the neighbors. But what made it look and feel old was the pendulum wall clock hanging atop the glass door to the veranda.
It had a loud mechanism, though there was no second-hand, the clock’s movement was very audible, tick-tocking through the day. There was a gong (nothing as subtle as a chime) to tell the half-hour, and every hour on the hour.
With the design of the house, the clock’s sounds could be heard all throughout the house and on to the streets and next door neighbors. The clock gave a sense of being old and antique to the otherwise early-1960’s design of the house. It gave a touch of anachronistic elegance to my granduncle’s home.
Pendulum clocks are not very common nowadays. Since most clocks nowadays are battery powered with a quartz mechanism, it shouldn’t be a problem to make a silent clock, like the early electric clock models which didn’t tick the seconds. Clock hands can be made to just move silently in one continuous motion going round and round the clock face. But it seems that people don’t like silent clocks, or don’t trust a clock which flows through its time-telling task like a leaf floating downstream. On quiet evenings, at home I can hear the clocks ticking even if there’s really no need to tick-tock.
The third hand still stops at each second on its circuit around the clock face, and with each second it stops. This ticking is what makes a clock sell. This is the audible assurance that the clock is working.
