Mantel clock with large balance wheel, c.1908-10

With the wider availability of cells and batteries in the early twentieth century, several clockmakers devised appealing portable electrical timekeepers for domestic use. Thomas Murday’s clock, patented in 1908 and produced by the Reason Manufacturing Company of Brighton, is one example. It uses a balance wheel, rather than a pendulum, and, unusually, deploys the principle of the ‘Hipp toggle’ – first devised in the 1840s by Swiss-German inventor Matthaus Hipp – to keep the balance in motion. Murday had previously collaborated with I. H. Parsons at Gent on electrical controlling clock systems, and made an attempt to establish himself independently in this area, but this clock was intended for the relatively small UK luxury market, where the glass shade allowed the appealing movement of the large balance to be fully appreciated. Murday seems ultimately to have become frustrated with the UK electrical clock market and emigrated to Australia in 1911. It is believed that somewhere between 80– 300 of these clocks were manufactured over a production period of approximately four and a half years.