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perfesser-bear -- it shows two of the older-style watchclock key stations. One is probably very old, as it seemingly predates the formation of Detex around World War I. I'll bet many of you have seen the type on the right at one point or another if you've lived in large cities.
perfesser-bear -- it shows two of the older-style watchclock key stations. One is probably very old, as it seemingly predates the formation of Detex around World War I. I'll bet many of you have seen the type on the right at one point or another if you've lived in large cities.
Category All / All
Species Unspecified / Any
Size 1512 x 2016px
File Size 791 kB
Question #1 of 2: what is Curse of the Narrows about?
It's actually a very interesting book (by Laura M. MacDonald). It's non-fiction, and is about the December, 1917 explosion of an ammunition vessel in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia that devastated the city; it still ranks, even a century later, as one of the largest man-made, non-nuclear explosions in history, with the equivalent of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. For comparison purposes, Hiroshima was 15 kilotons and Nagasaki, 25 kilotons. ISBN 0-8027-1510-9 if you want to look it up on Amazon. I recommend it.
It's actually a very interesting book (by Laura M. MacDonald). It's non-fiction, and is about the December, 1917 explosion of an ammunition vessel in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia that devastated the city; it still ranks, even a century later, as one of the largest man-made, non-nuclear explosions in history, with the equivalent of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. For comparison purposes, Hiroshima was 15 kilotons and Nagasaki, 25 kilotons. ISBN 0-8027-1510-9 if you want to look it up on Amazon. I recommend it.
Question #2 of 2: "What are these things used for, and how do they function?"
The objects you see in the picture are holders for keys used in watch-clocks used by night watchmen and security personnel. The holders were affixed to a certain point in, say, a building or on a street, and each of them contained a type of key in one form or another, which would be inserted into a clock.
An easy way of describing how they worked is to point you to a Warner Bros. Vitaphone short, "The Camera Speaks," from 1934. At the very start of the film, 0:20 in, you see a night watchman making his rounds. He goes to a Detex Corporation key holder, extends a key, and inserts the key into a watch-clock he's carrying. (The particular model you see used is a Detex Patrol watch-clock, based on key shape and how the watch-clock takes it.)
What the keys would do (in whatever form) is make an impression on a paper disk (or, in one case, a paper roll). The disk (or roll) was synchronized to the clock, so that it left a record that the guard/watchman was at a particular station at a particular time. Thus, you could check up on whether the guard or watchman was doing his job.
Detex Corporation was formed in the early 1920s from an amalgamation of a few different firms that made watch-clocks; a gentleman named Newman had a hand in founding two of those firms (he's the Newman referred to on one of them). Detex made a number of different models [Eco, Patrol, Alert, Newman, Guardsman], a few of which used different shaped keys, based on the systems used by each of the various companies before the merger. The watch-clocks were made for just about 100 years before Detex stopped making them a little over a decade ago. The paper disks and rolls are no longer made, and very few know how to service the watch-clocks.
Obviously, you wouldn't see these key-holders in any buildings built in, say, the last 10 years, and the watch-clocks started to be be phased out many years before that in favour of other kinds of systems, so that really the survivors were in old industrial and commercial buildings. It's a lot like some of the other industrial archaeology stuff you see on city streets, like night-deposit chutes in former bank buildings.
The objects you see in the picture are holders for keys used in watch-clocks used by night watchmen and security personnel. The holders were affixed to a certain point in, say, a building or on a street, and each of them contained a type of key in one form or another, which would be inserted into a clock.
An easy way of describing how they worked is to point you to a Warner Bros. Vitaphone short, "The Camera Speaks," from 1934. At the very start of the film, 0:20 in, you see a night watchman making his rounds. He goes to a Detex Corporation key holder, extends a key, and inserts the key into a watch-clock he's carrying. (The particular model you see used is a Detex Patrol watch-clock, based on key shape and how the watch-clock takes it.)
What the keys would do (in whatever form) is make an impression on a paper disk (or, in one case, a paper roll). The disk (or roll) was synchronized to the clock, so that it left a record that the guard/watchman was at a particular station at a particular time. Thus, you could check up on whether the guard or watchman was doing his job.
Detex Corporation was formed in the early 1920s from an amalgamation of a few different firms that made watch-clocks; a gentleman named Newman had a hand in founding two of those firms (he's the Newman referred to on one of them). Detex made a number of different models [Eco, Patrol, Alert, Newman, Guardsman], a few of which used different shaped keys, based on the systems used by each of the various companies before the merger. The watch-clocks were made for just about 100 years before Detex stopped making them a little over a decade ago. The paper disks and rolls are no longer made, and very few know how to service the watch-clocks.
Obviously, you wouldn't see these key-holders in any buildings built in, say, the last 10 years, and the watch-clocks started to be be phased out many years before that in favour of other kinds of systems, so that really the survivors were in old industrial and commercial buildings. It's a lot like some of the other industrial archaeology stuff you see on city streets, like night-deposit chutes in former bank buildings.
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