Self Winding Clock Company

The Self Winding Clock Company (SWCC) was a major manufacturer of electromechanical clocks from 1886 until about 1970. The Self Winding Clock Company clock mechanisms were truly revolutionary because the spring that powers the clock was not wound by hand but with an electric motor. The SWCC of New York was one of the first companies in the United States to successfully employ electric energy to power a clock. The winding motor is attached to, and mounted below, the conventional clock works. The unique feature of their patented clock mechanism is the automatic rewinding of the main spring each hour by the small electric motor. A contact switch mounted on the clock's center shaft is activated after the clock has run for one hour and the main spring is rewound one revolution. This rewinding occurs each hour. The power for the motor is supplied by batteries and the batteries last about one year before needing to be replaced. This clock mechanism never needed to be wound by hand and this eliminated the concern that someone may forget to wind the clock. Hence the company name, The Self Winding Clock Company.

The motivation for establishing the Self Winding Clock Company was early entry into a revolutionary and potentially profitable new industry. The product this new industry was selling was "exact time". This became possible following the development of the telegraph. The first marketers of time were observatories. The observatories used their celestial equipment to measure exact time and then transmit a time signal via telegraph lines to subscribers. This was done for a fee. In the 1850s and 1860s, communication and travel between cities became more common. The practice of observing local time was becoming obsolete and the need for everyone to agree to the exact time became essential. The railroads recognized that safety was related to precise timing and all timepieces in a given area must be set to the same time. The heads of the major railroads met on October 11, 1883, in Chicago to adopt our Standard Time System. The country was divided into four time zones with exactly one hour difference in each zone. The four time zones are part of the worldwide system of Standard time—a set of 24 somewhat equally spaced meridians tied to the daily cycle of daylight and darkness. It is based in Greenwich, England and termed Greenwich Mean Time.

Observatories had been selling exact time since the 1850s and transmitting the noon time signal via telegraph lines to customers, usually nearby cities and railroads. The signals were transmitted to sounders as second ticks and pauses that culminated in a noon time signal. The subscriber's clock could then be manually adjusted to exactly noon. For providing this exact time service there was a monthly or yearly charge. Observatories were affiliated with colleges or universities with the exception of the United States Naval Observatory (USNO), which is affiliated with the United States government. Competition for customers was keen between observatories, but by 1887 the USNO was recognized as the provider of Observatory Standard Time by the General Time Convention that had been convened by the country's railroads. This ended the intense competition for providing exact time. Western Union's time service distributed the time signal via its telegraph lines. Western Union had years of experience in transmitting USNO time signals and ultimately emerged as the provider of nationwide telegraph lines for the noon time signal.

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