Clocks · Oil clock
Oil clock, 18th century
- Maker / attribution
- Unrecorded in source
- Date
- 18th century
- Historical period
- Early Modern Horology (1600 – 1750)
- Country of origin
- Unrecorded in source
- Object type
- Oil clock
- Materials / technique
- pewter, glass
- Dimensions
- height 325 mm
- Holding institution
- Museo Galileo, Florence
- Accession / object no.
- Inv. 3570
- Credit line
- Museo Galileo, Florence
- Catalogue title (original)
- Oil clock (English)
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Record summary
Held and catalogued by Museo Galileo, Florence (object number Inv. 3570), this is an oil clock, dated 18th century. The Atlas places it in the Early Modern Horology period (1600 – 1750) of its Clocks collection. Materials and techniques recorded by the source: pewter, glass. Recorded dimensions: height 325 mm. The record is illustrated with 1 photograph.
Assembled from the source record's structured fields. Dates and attributions are given as the source states them; where a field is missing the Atlas leaves it blank rather than estimating.
Catalogue description
Catalogue description — Museo Galileo
Designed for night use, this oil clock consists of a glass phial inserted in a pewter lamp. Time was measured by the amount of oil left in the phial. The instrument is incomplete—the graduated hour scale is missing—and thus inoperative.
Historical context
Early Modern Horology (1600 – 1750)
Huygens' pendulum and balance spring transform accuracy; English makers develop the anchor and deadbeat escapements.
Huygens's pendulum (1656–57) improved clock accuracy from about a quarter of an hour to under a minute a day. The anchor escapement (c. 1670) and the long seconds pendulum created the longcase clock; London makers such as Fromanteel, Knibb, Tompion and Quare led European clockmaking, and French makers created the Boulle pendule.
Read the period in the timelineMore clocks from this periodEarlier: Renaissance Horology
Atlas type guide
Water, fire and incense clocks
Before the mechanical clock, intervals and hours were measured by flow and combustion. Outflow and inflow water clocks were used in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, China and the Islamic world; Chinese and Japanese incense clocks burned powdered incense along a maze-like path; oil-lamp clocks with graduated glass reservoirs were popular in German-speaking Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
These timekeepers needed constant correction and could not keep the hour automatically for long periods, but they underpinned temple ritual, legal procedure, astronomy and the earliest monumental astronomical clocks such as Su Song's clock tower (1090s) and al-Jazari's designs (1206).
What to look for
- Graduated vessels or glass reservoirs with hour scales.
- Incense trays with stencils for laying the powder trail.
- Pewter oil-lamp clocks with a glass reservoir marked in Roman numerals.
Dating clues
- Oil-lamp clocks are mostly eighteenth century and often reproduced later.
- Incense clocks were made in China and Japan into the twentieth century.
General guidance written by the Atlas editors about this kind of object. It is not a statement about this particular piece; for that, rely on the source record above and on physical examination.
Read next:Su Song's astronomical clock tower
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