It's About Time
2000 Loan Exhibit

A Millennium is in essence a celebration of the passage of time, which has been calculated and recorded in a thousand ways in as many years. Within that period, we have come from natural means (sun, wind, sand, and water), to marvelous man-made mechanical devices, and back to elemental forces such as the oscillations of quartz and cesium atoms today.

The quintessential innovation of the mechanical era was the tall case or “grandfather” clock with its revolutionary escapement mechanism and pendulum. This technological advance was not only contemporaneous with the American Revolution, but it also helped to define the evolution of daily life in colonial Philadelphia.

The marvelous examples of these seminal ancestral clock forms, displayed in the 2000 Loan Exhibit, were culled from both private and public collections. They represent both America's inestimable contribution to the advancement of horology and a unique assemblage of artifacts from her finest antiquarian hour.