North Coast Imports, Inc.

Our dealer in Ohio is planning a remarkable Holiday Event! Doctor Rudolf's Magical Musical Clockwork Promenade  will be an Open House with a continuous concert of mechanical music, refreshments, story tellers for children, and fantastic holiday shopping opportunities. In addition to the clockwork marvels always on display at Suburban Clock, we will have exhibits of special and rare antique music boxes, orchestrions, player pianos, organ clocks, and more! Come to Dr. Rudolf's Magical Musical Clockwork Promenade!  at Suburban Clock on November 22-23 for some hot cider, a music box concert, a story, and get your holiday shopping done early. We're sure to have something for everyone on your list! Visit  www.SuburbanClock.com  or the Facebook event page  for more information and directions to our store. Here are a couple videos of newly restored, antique organ clocks that will be on display. These are exceptionally rare and worth the opportunity to se...

The book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick has been on our reading list for quite some time (Take a look at the other titles while you're at it... just on the side bar of the blog ) So, it's great to see that Martin Scorsese has made a movie! This is Steampunk and Clockworkpunk gone mainstream!

"Memento Mori" is a reminder of mortality. Our " All Are Mine " clock is an excellent modern example that is the result of a long tradition of clockmaker artisans who remind us that life is short, and all things must pass. This clock tells us a story. In the upper left part of the clock, you'll see a rich man (with his bags of money and fine suit). Just above the 12:00 position, there is a carving of a king, and to his right there is a carved figure of a monk. Underneath the dial are carved representations of the young and the old; and at the bottom you can see the world. The clock bears the inscription, Alle sind mein , or "All Are Mine." Whether you are a rich person, royalty, a man of the church, young and old, all around the world, Death will eventually come to collect you. At the top, astride the foliott balance, the personification of the End of Life swings to collect his harvest. Along with my previous post , here are more very fine exam...

Here's a very interesting piece that recently sold at the Antiquorum Auctions . Perfect for all of you Steampunks and Goths, this piece is nearly 400 years old! This is a very interesting fusee with chain, verge escapement, and plain steel two-arm balance without spring. From the Watchismo Blog : During the first minute, the skull's expression seems to smile, the second minute it seems to laugh, the next appears to scream and finally, the jaws snap shut, as if the skull were trying to bite something. At the same time, one of the snakes slowly sinks back down into one of the eye sockets, while the other slowly comes out of the other eye, before retracting suddenly, as the first snake again springs out from its eye-socket. And to view the time, just open up the skull cap! It sold recently for $135,000. Designed & built in 1610 by Nicolaus Schmidt der Junger (Augsburg, Germany) as a skull set on two crossed shinbones and mounted on a gilt brass tripod, the hinged skull cap (r...

I love to point out new, artistic creations that are mechanical. Here's another great automaton found by the Automaton Blog .

Here's something to knock the socks off of any of you fans of automata. The newscast is in German, but anyone can get the drift. These are three mechanically animated figures. One plays the organ, one writes, and the other draws. To be clear: the organ isn't a player organ (that plays itself) while the figure sits in front and pretends to play... the figure ACTUALLY PLAYS the organ. The information for the tune is in her mechanics, so that her fingers and arms move to play the fairly complex little tune! These are housed in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Neuchâtel, and were built by theologian, mathematician and watchmaker Pierre Jaquet-Droz, his son Henri-Louis and their colleague Jean-Frédéric Leschot in the early 1770s. They were first exhibited to the public in nearby La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1774! This is truly amazing stuff.. Unlike the two mechanical boys, the woman-organist's body and head move independently of her task, and she can sit and breathe and fidget (h...

We made an earlier post on this fascinating story of the Boy With the Cuckoo Clock Heart . Here is a blog post with more info: Edinburgh, 1874. On the coldest night the world has ever seen, Little Jack is born with a frozen heart and immediately undergoes a life-saving operation. But Dr Madeleine is no conventional medic and surgically implants a cuckoo-clock into his chest. Little Jack grows up different to other children: every day begins with a daily wind-up. At school he is bullied for his 'ticking', but Dr Madeleine reminds him he must resist strong emotion: anger is far too dangerous for his cuckoo-clock heart. So when the beautiful young street-singer, Miss Acacia, appears - pursued by Joe, the school bully - Jack is in danger of more than just falling in love...he is putting his life on the line. [via Popin's Lair ]

Any connoisseur of mechanical wonders should follow the blog over at The Long Now Foundation . Here is an excerpted post from their blog: Early on in the Clock project we saw that of all the modern timepiece companies few were doing truly new things. One of the rare exceptions was Ulysse Nardin . Once we completed the first Clock prototype in fact we hosted Ludwig Oechslin their chief design innovator for several months here in San Francisco to evaluate our Clock which was very instructive. Long Now member and alumni Camille Davila sent me a note about a recent development at Ulysse Nardin, a cell phone that is charged by an offset weight swinging around from the ambient motion of the owner. This is an adaptation from mechanical self winding watch technology of course, but it is very cool to see it crossing over into other personal electronics. You can see more on this on their website here .

There were a couple of interesting posts over at The Steampunk Home Blog about apartments built inside clock towers... From architect Michael R Davis' website : The The Clock on Old Fulton Street in Brooklyn Heights is a 1,200 square foot loft located in an Italianate storage building built in 1892 on the site of the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper once edited by Walt Whitman. The most obviously striking feature in the apartment is the 10-foot glass and iron clock face, which serves as the living room window. Related posts: Wild World of Clockmakers What is Steampunk?

For reasons that will soon become clear to you, we at North Coast Imports, are especially fond of a new sub-genre the kids are all talking about - called Steampunk I thought I would write up a short blog post about this great thing, but keep in mind that this post only scratches the surface. There are authors, costumers, artists, film directors, hobbiests , tinkerers , and inventors all adding to and building on Steampunkery at an alarming rate. You can read about Steampunk on Wikipedia , of course, but there are also blogs ... and ... web forums aplenty. "What does a Steampunk do?" You may ask. A Steampunk might collect recordings of turn-of-the-century steam engines. Someone enamored with the Steampunk aesthetic might also turn their humdrum computer into a work of art that looks like it came from Jules Verne's imagination... ...or, a Steampunk might dress the part... The idea might be summed up as a longing for re-injecting style and beauty into our otherwise c...

Let's take a quick look at some of the terms that have been mentioned in recent posts.  To do that, we'll start at the basics of how mechanical clocks are usually powered. The clocks featured in recent posts are built before the general use of electricity.   Steam engines would normally be too large and inefficient to power such small devices, plus you would have continually stoke it to keep the clock running over night.  So what powers these clocks? We've discussed examples of the very earliest clocks that run on water power, but the tried and true method of running an accurate timepiece is to harness the power of gravity.  This is the original GREEN power.  Gravity is constantly renewable and reliable.  As long as we have a planet, we have gravity.  Weight-driven clocks also have the advantage of being very accurate.  The force of gravity is always constant in any particular location, so the clock won't speed up or slow down at any point because of an increase or ...

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon's unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid "illegal restorers" set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building's famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot , a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves. Read More This story reminds the fans of North Coast Imports that lovers of clockwork can be found in every part of life. DID YOU KNOW about the rising popularity of a genre and community called Steampunk ? Do a search for this on the internet and you will find a horde of information, full of fans and connoisseurs of the unusual and mechanical. The clocks and automata are a perfect fit for the Steampunk crowd.