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An exhibition that stopped time
Authors: Ana Griţco
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The National Museum of the History of Moldova possesses a collection of clocks and watches, which served as the basis for the exhibition "Clocks in the Course of Time". About two hundred items, selected in form, variety, technical and artistic intricacies, help the museum fulfill its natural purpose, preserving and promoting the national cultural heritage, of which this collection of old clocks is also a part. It consists of devices of the 19th-20th centuries with the mechanisms produced in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, Japan, Russia and the USSR.
The clock is exhibited according to the typology, the most attractive are the wall pendulum clocks and grandfather clocks of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century of the famous watch brands “Gustav Becker”, “Junghans”, “Philip Haas”, “Le roi a Paris”, “Lenzkirch” and others.
The extensive category of portable clocks includes table clocks of pleasant design, intended primarily for the morning wake of the owner, which are also called “alarm clocks”.
Another category is pocket watches, originally considered a male accessory. These valuable items from the past were produced by Abraham Louis Brequet, Henry Moser, Pavel Bure, “Omega”, “Doxa”, “Junghans”, “Tochnoe vremea”, “ZiM” and others.
Pocket watches were gradually ousted by .wrist watches. The majority of wrist watches in the museum collection are of Soviet manufacture: “Pobeda”, “Vostok”, “Polyot”, “Zvezda”. However, in the collection there are, though in a smaller number, watches of famous watch companies “Longines”, “Pavel Bure”, “H. Moser” and others.
Of special interest in the museum collection are clocks and watches, which belonged to outstanding figures in science, medicine, culture, etc.
The history of the clock would be incomplete without mentioning the tower clocks on the walls of the Chişinău buildings of the Lutheran Church, the Arch of Triumph, the Town Hall Tower, the Post Office, and the Railway Station, which are represented in the photographs.