Early in the 1800s, Chauncey Jerome (1793–1868) worked as a clockmaker. His firm grew significantly as a result of the success he had selling clocks. The son of a blacksmith and a nail craftsman, Chauncey Jerome was born in Canaan in 1793.
Making dials for long-case clocks in Waterbury was where Jerome started his career. Jerome travelled to New Jersey to create seven-foot clock cases after learning as much as he could about clocks, in particular clock cases.
He began working for Eli Terry in 1816, when he learned how to use machines to create previously handcrafted casings for “Patent Shelf Clocks.” Jerome made the decision to work for himself and started making cases that he traded to Terry for wooden motions.
With the help of his brother Noble, Jerome established a modest company in Bristol in 1822 where they made 30-hour and 8-day wooden clocks. The business put in the city of Bristol’s first circular saw.
Jerome’s business was selling more clocks by 1837 than all of his rivals combined. The firm had gained notoriety thanks to a six dollar, one-day wood-cased clock. A year later, his business was charging $4 for the identical clock.
The business charged 75 cents for the wholesale price of one line of clocks.
The selling of brass movements was the company’s main source of the enormous $35,000 yearly profit it was exhibiting by 1841.
Jerome relocated his clock-case production facility to St. John Street in New Haven in 1842. Jerome moved the entire business to the Elm City three years later when a fire damaged the Bristol factory. By expanding the facility, the business quickly rose to the position of the city’s largest industrial employment, manufacturing 150,000 clocks yearly.
Jerome was making the most affordable clocks in the world at the time because to his invention of a technique for stamping gears as opposed to utilizing casting.
Benedict & Burnham, a Waterbury-based maker of brass, and Jerome joined forces to create the Jerome Manufacturing Co. in 1850. After changing its name to the New Haven Clock Co. in 1853, the business produced 444,000 clocks and watches every year.
Jerome’s future should have been certain, but in 1855 he acquired a failing Bridgeport clock business run by P.T. Barnum, ruining his finances and forcing the closure of the Jerome Manufacturing Co. Jerome was never able to get over the setback. He was a better innovator than businessman, according to his own admission.
Jerome worked wherever he could while moving from place to town, frequently for clock firms that had learned how to make clocks utilizing Jerome’s ideas. He eventually made his way back to New Haven, where he passed away in poverty at the age of 74 in 1868.
Nevertheless, Jerome’s substitution of brass for wooden works—dubbed “the largest and most far-reaching contribution to the clock industry”—made history for his sector of the economy.
He was perhaps the most important and innovative figure linked with the American clock business in the middle of the 19th century. He earned and lost a fortune marketing his clocks. He also held office as mayor of New Haven from 1854 to 1855, a presidential elector in 1852, and a lawmaker in 1834.
In his always-humiliating autobiography, he said of his own life: “The ticking of a clock is music to me, and although many of my experiences as a businessman have been trying and bitter, I have satisfaction from knowing that I’ve lived the life of an honest man, and have been of some use to my fellow men.”