#1851
phil
Forum Participant

that’s neat. I love old radios with clocks. I have just a few but I would love to collect more of them ,Not sure on that particular one but a couple of things you may or may not know .

I think techron got the patent for the self starting mechanism for clocks, so clocks of this era didn’t always start on their own.
the one in my westinghouse has a little lever thing accessable through the face plate. you need to stick a pen in there and push the lever to one side and let it go to give it a kick start.

some have a red or green dot. I recall seeing a GE , or was it RCA? tombstone with a clock with those dots.
you’d set the thing so the dot was green , then if the power went out and on again the clock would restart itself and the red dot would indicate that the clock was wrong due to a power outage. My westinghouse would just sit there still.

so the one with the dot would give you some indication of how long the power was off, and the one with no self start mechanism would mark the time that the power went off.

I think most of these were synchroous motors so the AC 6o cycle beat would keep them running the right speed. It wreally worked well and no adjustment was needed like the wind up clocks. to this day the 60 cycle beat is accurate and so they do keep time as long as they have some lubrication.