Turret clock

As a public amenity to enable the community to tell the time, it has a large face visible from far away, and often a striking mechanism which rings bells upon the hours.

Beginning in 12th century Europe, towns and monasteries built clocks in high towers to strike bells to call the community to prayer.

Public clocks played an important timekeeping role in daily life until the 20th century, when accurate watches became cheap enough for ordinary people to afford.

Today the time-disseminating functions of turret clocks are not much needed, and they are mainly built and preserved for traditional, decorative, and artistic reasons.

Beginning in the Middle Ages around 1000 A.D. striking water clocks were invented, which rang bells on the canonical hours for the purpose of calling the community to prayer.

Other disadvantages were that they required water to be manually hauled in a bucket from a well or river to fill the clock reservoir every day, and froze solid in winter.

The first all-mechanical clocks which emerged in Europe in the late 13th century kept time with a verge escapement and foliot (also known as crown and balance wheels).

In the second half of the 14th century, over 500 striking turret clocks were installed in public buildings all over Europe.

Within a few decades most tower clocks throughout Europe were rebuilt to convert the previous verge and foliot escapement to pendulums.

Almost no examples of the original verge and foliot mechanisms of these early clocks have survived to the present day.

In the most common type, called gravity escapements, instead of applying the force of the gear train to push the pendulum directly, the escape wheel instead lifted a weighted lever, which was then released and its weight gave the pendulum a push during its downward swing.