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The Encyclopedia of Horology

Clock type · Domestic

Longcase (Grandfather) Clocks

Verified

Tall, freestanding weight-driven clocks with a long trunk enclosing the pendulum and weights, standardised in England after the introduction of the anchor escapement.

Movement & mechanism

  • Weight-driven trains, typically eight-day (two weights) or thirty-hour (one weight)
  • Anchor escapement with a seconds pendulum in most eight-day English work; earlier examples used verge escapements before c. 1670
  • Rack striking (from c. 1675–1690) superseding the earlier locking-plate system
  • Brass dial with silvered chapter ring on earlier work, giving way to painted dials from the later eighteenth century

Identification

  • Trunk door width and waist proportions relative to hood help indicate period and region
  • Brass dial with cast spandrels suggests pre-1770s work; painted dial suggests later manufacture
  • Check whether the movement, dial and case are original to one another — married examples are common
  • Seconds pendulum (approximately one metre) beats once per second and is a strong indicator of longcase, as opposed to shorter-pendulum bracket clocks

Terminology

  • Hood — the removable upper case section housing the dial and movement
  • Trunk — the long waist section concealing the pendulum and weights
  • Plinth (base) — the lower case section
  • Seconds pendulum — a pendulum of roughly one metre, beating seconds

Known variations

  • Thirty-hour single-weight longcase
  • Eight-day two-train (striking) longcase
  • Musical/quarter-chiming longcase
  • Moonphase-dial longcase

Collecting notes

Longcase clocks are widely collected and the market strongly rewards an original, unmarried case, dial and movement with a legible maker's signature. Provincial English makers are extensively documented in county-by-county reference works, which makes attribution and dating more reliable than for most clock categories.

Photographs

Longcase clock movement
Longcase clock movement — Edmund Beckett (Lord) Grimsthorpe, Public domain. Wikimedia Commons file page
Grandfather clock q
Grandfather clock q — Original uploader was Quadell at en.wikipedia Later version(s) were uploaded by Evertype at en.wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia Commons file page
Longcase clock
Longcase clock — AKS.9955, CC BY-SA 4.0. Wikimedia Commons file page

Photographs are illustrative examples of the type, not necessarily the exact object described. Verify details against the source file page.

Sources & references

  1. Britten, F. J., Old Clocks and Watches and Their Makers
  2. Loomes, B., Grandfather Clocks and Their Makers

Where sources disagree, the disagreement is stated rather than resolved silently.