Clocktime: Teiger Shelton Solar Longcase 1736, 02 The Dial

John Shelton – The Teiger Shelton walnut month-going longcase clock, concentric apparent and solar hands, annual calendar.

Join Dr John C Taylor OBE from the Clocktime digital museum as he discusses the dial of the Teiger Shelton Solar Longcase, dated 1736.

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So, the impressive break arch dial here starts off with the date of the month. You can see it's on the 25th of and then here are the actual months, November. This is then the sign of the zodiac month and you can see the signs of the zodiac here and here is Sagittarius and these in the middle show the Equation of Time. The Greenwich Mean Time and the solar time here, the Greenwich Mean Time hour and the lovely deadbeat seconds going around here. So, each swing of the pendulum, you can see the movement of the second hand and then it stops dead in line with the actual second and that's why it's called the deadbeat escapement because there's no recoil. Just covering over as it moves by the calendar showing again the date, the 25th, in case you can't quite read this big one up here. These wonderful big Indian mask spandrels covering virtually the whole of the outside of the dial and lovely gentle matting with 'John Shelton London' in bold. You can see the second hand, which normally you would see high up here, is below, it's just above the VI rather than being below the XII and that's because this has got the mechanism basically upside down with the winding holes high up and then it comes down and the escapement is here with the pendulum below. On the III side of the clock here you can see the little lever to cock the two shutters away from the winding hole. This shutter on this side is the true winding hole, whereas this one is put in and it actually allows you to adjust the calendar, so that if the king went away for his summer holidays, they didn't bother to keep the clock running but it wasn't too difficult to get the calendar back into phase again. So, if you cock the shutters, you can hear it click and that's the maintaining power and then you've got the winding hole for the mechanism and the winding hole to adjust the calendar above.