Curious About Clocks That Can't Keep Time

WBZ

How do you keep time? Are you old school or new school? Do you glance at your cell phone? Or do put your trust in the clock in the office or on the outside of public buildings.

Well, Carol in Warren is Curious:

"Clocks that never work--why have them? In high school the clocks were never accurate and the clock tower was not reliable when I was at Salem State!"

Of course, there is no real answer, but I did discover it's not always easy to keep these clocks running.

Take, for instance, Boston's 496 foot wristwatch: the Custom House.

I went inside the clock tower to find a gaggle of gears and more than a thousand little pieces keeping the hands of time on time. There I met David Hochstrasser. He owns the Clock Shop in Rockland. He isn't father time, but the Custom House clock is his baby.

"I made this gear 22 years ago," said Hochstrasser as he pointed at the bronze colored escape wheel of the old clock. Hochstrasser and his brother restored the clock in 1987.

I contacted Hochstrasser back in June after Carol Declared Her Curiosity, and then noticing one morning in a live picture on the WBZ morning news that the Custom House clock was seven minutes fast.

"I certainly don't like seeing things like that," said Hochstrasser. In a matter of days, He had the clock and its 11 and a half foot hands back on time.

Now, he's working on the old State House. He's trying to make sure that broken clock is right more than twice a day.

Recently, I watched as he hung out a little hidden door next to the Old State House clock. Tourists stopped and snapped pictures as he spun the hands of time with his own hands.

Hochstrasser told me "Trying to keep these old time pieces in order is a difficult job."

You would think time's worst enemy would be time itself. The clocks are old. The buildings are old. The hands are old. But actually it's the Boston weather. Just a little bit of wind and the hands lose speed or gain speed.

"I think it's amazing these clocks work at all," Hochstrasser said.

Some of you told us through Twitter and on our Declare Your Curiosity blog that you would like to "clean the clock" of the tower above the Forest Hills "T" stop. It has a bad rap for always being off.

One woman told us: "Oh my lord, the one at Forest Hills is off, downstairs at the Orange line at Back Bay, they are all just off."

Off, until David Hochstrasser gets his hands on them.

It's what makes him tick.

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