1.
CU Figure clock
0.08

2.
CU Alarm-clock
0.13

3.
CU Clock with glass bells
0.24

4.
CU ZOOM BACK TO GV Pedestal clock
0.35

5.
GV pocket-watches ZOOM TO CU
0.43

6.
CU Other pocket-watches (4 shots)
0.58

7.
CU Pocket-watch with chimes
1.10



Initials BB/1637 GR/AH/BB/1742



Script is copyright Reuters Limited. All rights reserved

Background: In an age when Apollo astronauts have their sleep timed to the nearest tenth of a second, and most of the world's population have their work-day timed to the nearest minute, it is pleasant to go back to a time when the art of time-keeping had not yet become a science.

In the Frankfurt Crafts Museum, a display of clocks goes back to such a time. They range over four centuries, and have been loaned by clock-collectors from all over Europe especially for this Christmas exhibition.

The collection includes a French clock, the dial of which is held by a statue of the Three Fates--the female figures from Greek mythology who spun, and cut, the thread of life. Only one of these clocks was ever made.

Also displayed is a fearsome Seventeenth-century alarm-clock, claimed to be the first made. When the appointed hour comes, a hammer falls, igniting a small charge of gun-powder....and lighting a candle to get up by.

SYNOPSIS: In West Germany's Frankfurt Museum, a special exhibition of old clocks. Some date back to the seventeenth century, such as this alarm-clock, which fires a charge of gun-powder. But there were gentler ways of waking up.....

This is the only known example of its type, a bronze pendulum clock made in France in eighteen-twenty. The mythological Three Fates hold the dial.

One of the earlier pieces in the exhibition, this crystal-cased necklace-watch was made in Southern Germany in sixteen-hundred. These enamelled pocket-watches were crafted two centuries later by Georg Braun, a German emigre living in England. But all the clocks and watches have one thing in common-they all come from an age when the art of time-keeping had not yet become a science.