The Morbier clock comes from the village of Morbier, the word itself meaning 'small market town,' in the eastern central French province of Franche-Comte, bordering on Switzerland. It's located about 30 miles north-northwest of Geneva in the Jura mountains.
Not only are clocks its only claim to fame. Cheese, too, is another product that brings a lot of revenue to the little town, since from all I've read, it's an excellent product.
The clockmaking business began in the middle of the 18th. century, partly to keep people occupied during the long winter months. The denizens of Morbier would make the parts, which would then be bought by finishers who would assemble them. Since the village was in the Franche-Comte region, the clocks themselves were also known as Comtoise.
Their design is most interesting. The movements are in the form of skeleton clocks, there being three thick steel strips in the front and three in the back, all held together by two thinner steel plates, one at the top, the other at the bottom, between which run the gears on their arbors. To the best of my knowledge, there are two types of Comtoise; the longcase and the wall clock, both of which use weights for their motive force, while the movements for both are basically the same.
A steel pendulum hanger is suspended by a suspension spring in the usual way from the top plate. So as not to interfere with the hour and minute pipes of the motion work, a circle is formed in the hanger, so that it clears this mechanism. As you view the movement from the front, the escapement, latterly of the anchor type, previously the old verge and foliot, is set between the left hand plates, or strips. A simple verge wire drops down below the motion work, and is connected to the pendulum hanger by a brass arm, screwed into the hanger at one end and free to move, while the wire verge goes through a small hole in the brass at the other end.
The effect is that when the pendulum is swung, the escapement is put into operation by the brass strip horizontally connected to the verge. On the other side of the time train, we have the strike train. Normally, the rack of the strike train describes an arc of a circle and at rest lies at very roughly 30 degrees to its fulcrum. Not so the Morbier. This is the only rack mechanism I've ever seen that operates in a straight line. It simply goes up and down perpendicularly.
The snail sits in its usual place on the hour wheel, and is of a most pleasing, even artistic design. The craftsman who made the particular one of which I'm thinking deserves high praise for his work. Indeed, these clocks are a curious blend of the artistic and the rustic. What makes them unmistakable, of course, are their huge pendulum bobs. They aren't unduly heavy, but they're constructed out of a single piece of brass sheet, hammered or pressed into quite intricate patterns. The dials are surrounded in the same fashion.
Mark you, having said that these clocks are mainly wall and floor models, there are types with all manner of complications; automata, cuckoo, and those with experimental escapements which make them highly desirable to collectors.
The one startling feature common to most Morbier clocks is the fact that it's a double strike. By that, let's suppose the time to be four o'clock. At two minutes to the hour, it will strike four times, and precisely at four o'clock it will strike four times again. Unless the man who's servicing the clock knows about this quirk, he can find it quite upsetting. Fortunately, by pure chance, I'd read about this little inclusion, so that I was ready for the first Morbier I ever tackled. This business of the double strike is supposed to be a call to prayer; two minutes prior to the Office, then it's up habit and sprint to church before the clock strikes a second time.
Most regrettably, production ceased on these splendid old clocks at the start of the First World War in 1914
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