Clock Manufacturer

Early Life. Chauncey Jerome grew up working on the family farm, attending school only three months a year in the winter. At age eleven he was working in his father's blacksmith shop. After his father died, at fourteen Chauncey went to live and apprentice with a local farmer. In the off-season Chauncey worked for Eli Terry, the nation's pre-eminent manufacturer of inexpensive wooden clocks. Terry pioneered clock-making by designing machine tools that any unskilled woodworker could use in the mass production of wooden clock parts. With his little crew of twelve packed into a four-hundred-square-foot shop powered by a waterwheel, Terry was able to produce a thousand clocks annually by 1806 at a price between twenty and thirty dollars apiece. By 1840 he had reduced the price of clock "movements" (the active part of the clock mechanism) from fifty dollars to five dollars, and Terry...