At the end of the 1700s only one American family in ten owned a clock. By 1844 an English visitor could write, “Wherever we have been in Kentucky, in Indiana, … in every dell of Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.” That change can be laid to one clockmaker and one clock: Eli Terry and his pillar and scroll.

Terry was one of those people who happened to be standing on the corner when history took a turn. Born in East Windsor, Connecticut, in 1772, he moved to the western part of the state in 1793 and set up shop in Plymouth as a clockmaker and watch repairer. This, while an honorable craft, was not widely viewed as a way to get rich. America was a nation of farmers in the 1790s, and most people lived by the sun and the moon. If they needed to know what time it was, they checked the big clock on the meetinghouse steeple. Clocks were rare and expensive items, each one made by hand to order. The total cost of a fine brass-movement clock and case might run as high as eighty dollars—this in a time when average annual income was around one hundred dollars.

But America was changing from an agrarian to an industrial society, and working in a factory meant keeping someone else’s hours. Terry saw a new market developing for a cheap, mass-produced clock that might go into the homes of working people. Around 1803 he put up a small building on a stream and began to experiment with large production runs in advance of orders. He would turn out not one custom part at a time, as clockmakers had always done, but dozens of interchangeable parts. It was the first time this was done on a large scale anywhere in American industry. Some accounts have him working up from twenty-five to a run of five hundred; Terry’s son Henry placed the number at one thousand in an 1853 memoir. Either way, “It was regarded by some at the time as so extravagant an undertaking as to subject him to considerable ridicule,” Henry Terry wrote. Eli let them laugh. In 1807 Edward and Levi Porter of Waterbury asked Terry to produce four thousand wooden clock movements. He accepted the order. It took him three years to fill, but the cost per movement, without case, dropped from thirteen to ten dollars, and Terry learned that production on a grand scale was possible.

Now all he needed was the right clock. From peddling trips in the early 1800s he knew that most working-class homes weren’t suited for the big tall-case clock. Around 1814 he invented a clock that would run for thirty hours