Master Clock

For a single building or a whole industrial complex, this spring-driven master clock, fitted with electrical contacts and placed in a central location, could send electrical signals to remote secondary time dials, bells, whistles and time stamps for marking paperwork. All would be synchronized to the same time. At the beginning of the twentieth century many factories, schools, and other public buildings installed such integrated electrical systems.

This clock was made by International Time Recording Company, Endicott, N.Y. Formed in 1900 from the merger of several firms that pioneered automatic machines for recording employee time and task time, ITRC then absorbed its competitors. By about 1920 ITRC claimed they made over 260 different styles of time and cost recorders, both electrical and spring-driven. After 1933, in combination with the Tabulating Machine Company and Computing Scale Company, ITRC would be known as International Business Machines (IBM).

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