Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Grandfather Clocks

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

If you've ever wondered why a grandfather clock is called a grandfather clock and you have 12 minutes to spare, this is your lucky day. Listen in to the brand new Short Stuff series. It's everything you want from Josh and Chuck, and less! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to Short Stuff, the very brief podcast on Josh. There's Chuck, that's Jerry.

Let's get going. No time for laughing, Chuck. Welcome, everybody. And just as a very quick explanation, we had this idea because we often come across cool little interesting tidbits that certainly don't warrant a 45 minute episode. And everyone else on the planet

is doing little shorty episodes on their podcast. And we thought, well, hey, in your tin, why don't we give it a shot? Yeah, let's try something new for once. Yeah, so I hope you all like it. Great. Well, we've just wasted a lot of time, Chuck. We might not get to the end of this episode now.

I thought we agreed there was no ticking clock. So you've seen a grandfather clock before, right? Yeah, we had, you know, not the, what is the like the smaller version called that hangs on the wall? Actually, I saw those called a wag on the wall clock. So these are the original ones. Okay, we had one of those growing up.

Or it's just like an exposed pendulum swinging back and forth. Yeah, you know, three-ish feet. Three-ish feet in length? Yeah. Oh, okay. I thought you meant like off the wall. No, yeah.

No, like that sounds dangerous. My dad rigged up a hovering mechanism. It was pretty advanced. Right. And the pendulum was super sharp. So you better watch out. So, but you're familiar with like the kind that are tall and stand on the floor.

Yeah. So those are actually, you know and love them as grandfather clocks. Sure. But the name grandfather clock didn't come around until about 200 years after grandfather clocks were invented. Yeah, and it's funny when I saw this that they were invented about 350 years ago.

And when I saw that they were originally called long case clocks, I immediately would like to that name better. Long case better than grandfather, okay. Yeah, I think it's cool. I'm ambivalent toward both. Because you like cuckoo clocks. I like the, I do like cuckoo clocks for sure.

But the name grandfather clock, we'll find out where it came from, but the grandfather clock itself, or the long case clock was actually one of the first clocks. And it kind of makes sense because if you think about it, when you start out inventing something new, it's huge, it's enormous. And then as you get better at it over time

and find like workarounds and shortcuts and stuff, you can make it smaller and smaller. So it makes sense that what some of the first actually precise clocks were giant grandfather clocks. And again, they were originally, they just had the pendulum swinging back and forth. You could mount them on the wall. They were called wag on the wall clocks.

And the first person who really tried to invent this thing was none other than Galileo Galilee. Yeah, he's the one that discovered, hey, a pendulum swings at a constant rate, regardless of its size. I think we've got something here, boys. And unfortunately, he died before he could actually make a legit clock.

Yeah, but he tried for like his whole life. Yeah, that's what killed him. It was, the sharp pendulum got him. He's like, I regret everything. But a Dutch astronomer named Christian Higgins built the very first pendulum clock in the, what, 1657. And this is when, like apparently, this is the most accurate timepiece ever

in the history of the world. Yeah, before that it was, clocks were accurate within 15 minutes every 24 hours. It's pretty good. Sure, for the early 17th century. But then Higgins comes along and his was accurate within a minute every 24 hours. So finally, what he had produced was something

that you could actually use for like scientific purposes, which again, as you said, he was an astronomer and you need precise clocks for astronomy. So he kind of made a scientific instrument for himself more than, you know, let's make something that everybody sets their watch to. Yeah, so his wasn't, it wasn't a long case clock though, but because people are, people like to invent

and build on others' work. Of course, he's got bigger and bigger. And eventually in London and what, like not even too many years later, three or four years later, the very first long case clocks started, like six feet tall, started to be released into for purchase. Yeah, and there was a dude named Clement.

I can't remember his first name, but he added, he basically made the pendulum so precise that all of a sudden there was a clock that was accurate within a second over 24 hours. And so they added minute hands and second hands and really started to show off. But at the time, in the late 17th, early 18th centuries, you had to literally be royalty to afford a clock like this.

And then over time, again, they figured out shortcuts and there were improvements in manufacturing. You just had to be somewhat rich to afford them. And they started to spread and they started to kind of encase them in wood. They started really kind of tricking them out and everything. They made the pendulum look really beautiful.

And then what you know and love as a grandfather clock really kind of was developed between, I think up to about 1850, I think, right? From the late 17th century up to 1850. That sounds about right. And then that was like kind of the golden age of the grandfather clock. And then they just stopped progressing.

They said, this is perfect. This is the grandfather clock, although we don't call it that yet. And we're going to just leave it as is and say we're happy with this model. Yeah, so put a pin in that. And then we switch on over to the story of a man named Henry Clay Work, who was born in Connecticut in 1832.

He was a musician, a singer-songwriter, very emo from what I understand. A little bit, I got that too. And it was back in the days when you would write like war songs. That doesn't happen much today unless you count like Toby Keith. Whatever work he's doing,

whatever good work he's doing. But he was a champion of the North and he had a song called Kingdom Coming, a pro-union ballad, which gave him a music contract with a publishing firm named Root and Katie, or Catty. And he started pumping out hits over like the next decade or so until hard times fell. He made some bad financial moves.

Two of his kids died in the 1870s. And so his light, he kind of fell on hard times, but he would come back with a big, big hit called grandfather's clock. Right. And this is actually where the name grandfather clock comes from, is from this guy's song. And it's a pretty sweet song, actually.

It's very sad. He basically sings about how his grandfather, his great-grandparents bought a long-case clock on the day his grandfather was born. Yeah, what a great baby gift. Right, exactly. Here you go, kid. Maybe someday you'll be this tall.

Who knows? Here's a grandfather, a long-case clock and a wooby. It's like, don't let it fall on you. But they, so they bought, yeah, I guess not that you pointed out as a weird baby gift, but it was a great, sturdy, reliable clock, and it worked through the grandfather's whole life until, until the day he died.

And the day that the grandfather died, the clock stopped as well, and it still hasn't worked since. Yeah, here's the lyric. My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood 90 years on the floor. It was bought on the morning of the day he was born and was always his treasure and pride,

but it stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died. Yeah, and America was like, oh, God. This is the greatest song anyone will ever write. We can just stop. We can stop improving on grandfather clocks. We can stop writing songs now. And the two come together in this writing by work,

or this song by Henry Clay Work, right? Yeah, it was a big, big hit. They sold close to a million copies, made the equivalent of about $95,000 on the song. Johnny Cash would record it. Prairie Home Companion spoofed it. I think Skrillex, just kidding, remixed it. It was in a video game called Five Nights at Freddy's.

Yeah, remixed. It was remixed. Yeah, and if you look it up in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary, if you look up grandfather clock, it attributes the etymology of that term to work, Henry Clay Work. That his name does not stick to the brain.

No. Even having Henry Clay in it. I know, you'd think that would do it for us. Yeah, but Henry Clay Work, it just does not stick. So it was a huge deal, and it's pretty much undisputed. I think it's 100% undisputed that Henry Clay Work was the person who came up with this song that later became the name for long case clocks,

grandfather clocks. Right, so we're gonna take a very short break, and we're gonna come back and tell you about what inspired Work to write that song himself. ["Pay Dude the 90s"] On the podcast, Pay Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, so that was a pretty good cliffhanger. I think so. Because you think, like, sure, Henry Clay Work came up with this song, and it had the effect of renaming the long case clock, the grandfather clock.

But anyone, any thinking person's brain is going to keep going and say, but wait a minute, where did Henry Clay Work get the inspiration for this song? And there's actually two stories for that. Yeah, so one of them is, there's a hotel called the George Hotel in, I'm sorry, the full name is the George Hotel of Pierce Bridge. Yeah, get it right.

In North Yorkshire, England. And they said, and they still claim, that dude wrote this in the lobby. He stayed here in 1874, saw our long case clock, sat down, and started writing a song about it, because our clock is frozen in time at 11.05 with a story that is likely what I call BS and what others would call folklore.

Well, I don't, if it's not BS, then I would say, yes, these people are, they have the claim to inspiring the Henry Clay Work song, because it has basically the same story. There was a clock bought for the hotel owner's sons, and when the first son died, the clock started to slow, and when the second son died, it stopped altogether. And if Henry Clay Work stayed at that hotel,

heard that story in 1874, it's so effective it's done. But yes, there is a lot of, a lot of people are like, those people are lying, lying through their teeth, and people in their town won't speak to them actually, because they so detest the lie. That's right. And the other version of the story, of course, has to do with the family, but not his family,

his wife's family, Sarah Parker, they said, no, no, no, no, no, no, that's, we have the clock. And then he wrote the song about our clock, and he wrote it because, you know, he married our daughter, and we have this great long case clock that belonged to Sarah's grandfather, and it really has nothing to do with a haunted clock that stops when people die.

Right, but it did, it doesn't work anymore. Sure. So, you know, there you go. And then when people ask the family, do you have the clock, they just say, yes. And then leave it at that. All right, and there's our story. I've got one more thing.

There's actually, there's actually different, so a grandfather clock is seven feet. Yeah. A six footer is called a grandmother clock. Okay. Five footer is called a granddaughter clock. That's cute. So there you go, Chuck.

And anything shorter is called, you're not even a family member clock. That's right. I guess that's it. Yeah. If you wanna find us, you can find us on the web, and we're both at stuff you should know.com. So look us up and we'll see you next time, right?

That's right. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.