A GIGANTIC TIMEPIECE.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3144, 17 March 1879, Page 4

A GIGANTIC TIMEPIECE.

In an article on the great clock in the Palace Yard, Westminister, a writer in All the Year Bound says:—The four dials facing the four points of the compass are each so large that there •re but few rooms in London that would contain one of them on the floor. They are more than 22 feet in diameter! the frame work, figures and dinlions are of iron and the spaces filled with opalescent glass. The figures are two feet high, and the minute marks nearly twelves inches apartlittle at we may think it when looking up from the palace yard. The minutehand with its counterweight and cen- I tral boss, is about 2021bs weight. This, however, is little more than one-third as much as the original hand designed by Sir Charles Barry, which was so •laborated and intricate, so full of angles and quirks that they interfered with the going of the clock. The minute hand is for the most part a flattened copper tube, and is eleven feet long without the counterweight. During a heavy snowstorm a few weeks ago, the mixture of snow and rain that fell on it pressed so heavily as to stop its going. The hands of the hour dials are it is said, the largest in the world excepting those of the Mechlin clock, which are, however, only four hands, not comprising those which mark the minutes. Large clock hands of course require the descent of heavy weights to set them going. Those at Westminster are indeed heavy. No less than a depth of 170 feet in the clock tower is allotted for the descent of weights. Going weights and striking weights together require about 4000 turns of a double-manned winch handle to wind up. As there are weights to set the noble clock going so there must be a pendulum to regulate motion when once produced, * and it is a pendulum in good sooth. It weighs nearly 700 pounds, is about 13ft. long to the centre of oscillation, and 15ft. total length. The rod which holds it consists of a perforated iron tube inside one of zinc. Each beat of the pendulum has to regulate the motion of something like a ton and a half of metal, in the form of hands, counterweights and clock machinery, and yet bo delicately is it suspended by a slip of springing steel, that one single ounce placed upon it at a particular spot would affect the rate of regulations."

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