Joseph Knibb

Joseph Knibb was one of the leading English clockmakers of the generation immediately following the introduction of the pendulum, apprenticed to his cousin Samuel Knibb before setting up in Oxford in the 1660s and moving to London around 1670, where he worked in Fleet Street until retiring to Hanslope in 1697. He produced longcase, bracket, and lantern clocks of high quality during the formative decades of English pendulum clockmaking, working alongside contemporaries such as Thomas Tompion in establishing London's reputation for precision domestic timekeeping.

Knibb is closely associated with the 'Roman striking' system, in which a reduced count of bell strokes (using a smaller strike for the numeral five, as in Roman numerals) economised on going-train power and wear, a refinement found on a number of his surviving clocks and occasionally attributed to him, though the broader history of striking-work economy in this period involved several London makers and the attribution should be treated as traditional rather than exclusively documented. He is also noted for early and distinctive case designs, including so-called 'Knibb-style' architectural pediments on longcase clocks.

Documentary survival for Knibb's workshop practices is thinner than for Tompion, since no comparable archive of his personal papers survives; most of what is known comes from the clocks themselves, guild and parish records, and later scholarly cataloguing of signed examples, meaning some biographical particulars (exact training dates, full family history) remain incompletely established in the literature.