Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/670

 the maker nine years before he could say it was done. The clock is about nine feet high, and there are sixty-three figures that move by machinery. There are only twenty-two moving figures in the Strasburg clock. On the front of the Wilkesbarre clock—the one we are speaking of—there are three shelves or balconies. Along the lower balcony a mounted general leads a file of Continental soldiers. The liberty-bell rings, and a sentinel salutes the procession. A door in the upper balcony opens and shows Molly Pitcher, who fires her historic cannon, the smoke of which is blown away from the interior of the clock by a fan. Then the portraits of the first twenty Presidents of the United States pass along in a kind of panorama, the Declaration of Independence being held aloft by Thomas Jefferson. On another of the balconies the twelve apostles go by; Satan comes out, and the cock crows for the benefit of Peter. When Christ appears, a figure of Justice raises a pair of scales, while a figure of Death tolls the minutes upon a bell.



All things considered, the most wonderful of all the large clocks constructed in America (Fig. 6) is the one made by a watchmaker of Hazleton, Pennsylvania—a piece of work that shows forty-eight moving figures, and that it has taken the lifetime of the inventor to produce.