Welcome
This site is a gallery and reference for collectors, horologists, and anyone fascinated by how the world kept accurate time before the age of the internet and smartphones. The collection spans more than a century of timekeeping technology -- from telegraph-era Self Winding Clock Company master clocks that distributed Naval Observatory time through Western Union's wire network, to Cold War-era cesium beam frequency standards accurate to billionths of a second.
Mitchell Janoff has been collecting and restoring master clocks, slave clocks, and precision frequency standards for over ten years. His interests are primarily in time keeping and time distribution with a focus on clocks made by the Self Winding Clock Company of New York (SWCC). He has over twenty SWCC clocks, all of which receive hourly synchronization signals from a computer-based "master clock" every hour on the hour. For more information on synchronizing self winding clocks see the 1995 article from the NAWCC Bulletin "Self Winding Clock Synchronization".