A Craftsman's Legacy by Eric Gorges

Author:Eric Gorges
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2019-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

Just about anything can be fixed. —nathan bower, clockmaker

I’m a mechanically-minded person who lives for gears and gadgets, and I spent two days with clockmaker Nathan Bower up close and asking questions, but I’m still not certain how a clock works. The whole process is incredibly mysterious to me. It comes down to a pendulum, springs, and a gear set. The pendulum, which has a specific weight, provides the initial motion; its momentum, maintained by gravity, triggers the mechanism, which is a series of gears. A clockmaker uses three gear sets, each one based on a unit of time: seconds, minutes, or hours. One gear moves a certain amount at a certain speed, which sets off the next, which starts the next.

As a clockmaker, Nathan’s work requires a level of exactitude and attention to detail that stands out, even among the most impressive people we have featured on the show. When Nathan started out he had no background or lineage in the craft of clockmaking at all—his parents are children’s book authors. He simply made a decision to learn this incredibly difficult and technical skill. When he was eleven years old, he took on his first broken clock in his home. Sitting down with it, he fixed it in the most straightforward way possible: he took it apart and put it back together. Twenty years later, in his parents’ house, that clock continues to run.

The first mechanical clockmakers in Europe were medieval monks who needed a way of marking when to call people to prayer. It was not until the Industrial Revolution, when trains were able to shuttle people from place to place, that an agreed-upon time standard became necessary. By the twentieth century, when factories and mass-produced parts came along, the individual clockmaker became less necessary, though the rich and complicated craft lives on in people like Nathan Bower.

After fixing clocks for ten years Nathan began to create his own clocks, which are astounding works of art. He makes skeleton clocks, which are transparent, with all the gears exposed. You can literally see what makes it tick. There is a beauty in opening up a machine to the world like that, to show how it operates. So many machines nowadays hide the works; you couldn’t figure out how they operate, or how to fix them, even if you wanted to.

Cars were once relatively easy to fix yourself. You could take the vital organs out—the carburetor or distributor—and clean a clogged part or replace a worn part, and it would run again. But mass manufacturing has removed us even further from understanding how things work. A lot of it is about profits: We can’t fix things ourselves if we don’t know how they’re made. Eleven-year-old Nathan Bower knew this, and that one formative experience sent him down the rabbit hole to learn how to put these machines together.

In Nathan’s workshop, surrounded by his complicated and intricate clocks, I got lost thinking about the great invisible force of time. It is

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