• Corpus ID: 198943520

Remembering the first battery-operated clock

@inproceedings{Ronalds2015RememberingTF,
  title={Remembering the first battery-operated clock},
  author={Beverley F. Ronalds},
  year={2015}
}

• B. Ronalds
• Published 2015
• History

This year marks the bicentenary of the publication of the first battery-operated clock. It was rediscovered in the 1970s by Charles Aked, Council member of the Antiquarian Horology Society and first Chairman of the Electrical Horology Group, and further information has since come to hand. The clock was created by a prolific inventor named (later Sir) Francis Ronalds FRS (1788–1873); he lived on the Upper Mall in Hammersmith, London, at the time and a plaque on the house records the pioneering electric telegraph demonstration he performed there the next year. He had just ‘retired’ at age twenty-six from running the family’s cheesemonger business in Thames Street in order to focus on his first love of electrical science and engineering. The power source for the clock was a recently developed device called an electric column or dry pile. Volta had described the voltaic pile (now known as the battery) in 1800 — one version comprised a series of zinc and copper (or silver) discs interleaved with cardboard soaked with brine. The dry pile differed in that the paper discs were dry (Fig. 1). It was created with the goal of learning how the battery worked and, in particular, the role of the brine in comparison Remembering the first battery-operated clock