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A timely piece on Waltham

The BBC revisits the history of Watch City, a.k.a. Waltham, the city that made time regular.

Well, except for Ashland, a.k.a. Clocktown (the high-school teams are the Clockers), named for the factory that made the world's first electric clocks, as designed by Henry Ellis Warren.

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I went there ten years ago when then New England Modek Engineering show was held there. Back then they had (for some reason) a two foot cube of magnetic core memory from one of the first transistorized computers built in the United States in the early 1950s. All 8000 bits of it.

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The watch industry in Waltham supported a bunch of case-making companies that bought movements from the Waltham works and put them into their own cases. My grandfather's leverset Waltham is in a case made by Appleton Tracy Co. of Waltham. The watch still runs and keeps good time. The engraving is pretty worn.

When I was at UMass Boston in the 70s, I thought about writing a paper on the watch company, inspired by that watch. I went to the BPL and found a history of the company, printed about 1910. The book had been bound imperfectly; none of the signatures were trimmed, so they presented folded edges where the individual pages were supposed to open. Obviously, no one had opened or read this book that had sat on the library shelf for over 60 years. Kind of sad.

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...someone can come up with a definitive one-liner that involves cuckoo clocks and Cambridge?

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btw a relative of mine came back from vietnam with an army issued compass that was made in waltham.

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I was at a watch museum in Germany once and they had several Waltham watches. I thought that was pretty cool.

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We still got Chelsea Clock , Chelsea by the sea.

"Chelsea" Clock Museum http://www.chelseaclockmuseum.com/

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