798 Transactions of the American Institute. 



St. John's clock was built by Henry Harris, Curtain Road, Lon- 

 don, 1812. 



It is almost identical with St. Paul's, excepting it is better finished 

 m some respects, and has the worst escapement I ever saw. The 

 scape wheel teeth are very long and slim, the impulse angle near 

 sixty degrees, a dead drop of near one eighth, and to finish, a short 

 pendulum of seven and a half feet, it gives the pallats a blow as it 

 escapes, that shakes the whole movement. Nearly every tooth in 

 the scape wheel has been broken out; I have put in five new ones. 

 The weight is too heavy' but being a solid casting, cannot be 

 reduced, and if like St. Paul's, a large amount of the power was 

 not lost by the vibration of the pendulum spring, I cannot say 

 where it might spring to. The scape wheel teeth slide on the pallats 

 an inch, and yet the curve is so perfect that I cannot perceive one 

 fraction of motion in the wheel. 



We now come to two clocks built by Stokell — the Dutch 

 Reformed, Fifth avenue and Twenty-ninth street, and St. Mark's. 

 The first is copied literally from St. John's, excepting the escape- 

 ment, and the same may be said of the other, only it is reduced iu 

 size. In both he gave a slight recoil to his pallats, which deadens 

 the motion, and keeps them within bounds. Stokell made some 

 of the finest and best regulators we have in the country, and it 

 seems strange that he should copy two clocks from one known to 

 be bad. I know you are getting tired, and it is a long walk, but I 

 cannot describe things just as I would like to, without going all 

 the way down to Trinity Cathedral. 



Trinity, as Mr. Rogers well remarked a short time since, is the 

 heaviest clock in America. He seems to have made an efibrt to see 

 how much metal could be put in a clock. The frame stands nine 

 feet long, five high, and three wide. The main wheels are thirty 

 inches. There are four wheels in the time train, and three each in 

 the strike and chime. The scape wheel is nine and a half inches. 

 The pallats are dead beat, rounded impulse, and Avell jeweled; all 

 the pinions are lantern. The barrels are twenty inches, turning 

 three times in twenty-four hours. The winding wheels are a solid 

 casting, thirty inches diameter, and two inches thick, and are driven 

 by a pinion and arbor. On this arbor is placed a jack or another 

 wheel, pinion and crank, and it takes eight hundred and fifty turns 

 of this crank to turn each weight up. It takes seven hundred feet 

 of three-inch rope for the three cords, and over an hour for two 

 men to wind it. The retaining power is operated by hand. Two 



