Clock by Asa Munger (1777–1851), 1817, Herkimer, NY. Click to listen: Courtesy of Nathan Liverant and Son Antiques. Video by Gary R. Sullivan and Kate Van Winkle Keller. For more information on musical clocks, see our September/October 2013 issue for an article by Gary R. Sullivan and Kate Van Winkle Keller.
Queries: American musical clocks
The first musical clocks were invented in the Netherlands in the fourteenth century. Two hundred years later European royalty and aristocracy were commissioning them. At the palace of Versailles Marie Antoinette possessed a musical clock that played ten of her favorite tunes. (It was discovered at the palace in June 1914, two weeks before the start of World War I.) …