The Clock Museum

General

It is a valuable collection which shows the evolution of clocks in time. From the first "clocks"- the sun dial, the burning clocks, the water clocks or the clocks with sand- up to the "ancient" mechanical and modern ones. The museum was opened in 1963, in a hall belonging to The Palace of Culture (Palatul Culturii) from Ploiesti. After ten years, the collection has been moved to a building dating from 1910, a private house, which was then nationalized. The building it's itself a monument of architecture, in neo-Gothic style.

The museum has an impressive collection of over 4,000 pieces, including the first pocket watch, and items designed by famous horologists from Paris and London. These spectacular pieces are not just works of great clock makers, but as well as of men of art, who made the clocks look as attractive as possible. Among the oldest pieces of the collection we name the type pendules, made of golden bronze, engraved or cut, sometimes with enameled dials. The oldest of the clocks, dated 1562, additionally asserts the intercrossing of preoccupations for calculating time and for astronomy, as it has astronomical dials.

The collection also contains some curious clocks, such as: "the invisible clock", with transparent dial and a hidden-in-frame mechanism; the "steam factory" (in miniature) made in Paris in 1800; the miller's clock, the barber's clock, the umbrella-clock, created in England; the painting-clock with mobile figurines or the stamp-clock. A last surprise for the visitors of The Clock Museum are the musical boxes, which function with the help of a mechanism similar to that of a clock. The invention is dated at the end of the 19th century, when in Europe and America the devices for musical recordings began to get known.