TRANSCRIPT
of Live Storytelling Event @ BRISTOL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Here we are, 1785.

Somewhere up north, in the Rivertown of Harford, they're debating what to call this collection of folks that want to turn their village into a city. They decide – Bristol don't quite know why, there's some theories why – but they decide Bristol.

Meanwhile in Torrington woods, a baby is born.

You are that baby. Wear the habit of the character right now. You open your eyes in a colonial farmhouse in Torrington.  The first thing that you feel when you're born is the warmth of a fire in the house, because that's how you get warm. The second thing you feel is the chill that's outside the house, the cold drafts because your house is made of wood and outside those wooden walls is a dark, cold forest. The next thing that you feel, being born in that small colonial farmhouse in Torrington, is the people around you. The family, the faces. As you open your eyes over the next couple years you begin to see where you're from ... you're from a farm, you're from the woods, you're from a small two room house with a chimney in the center that gives you warmth. It's also your stove, it's also where you cook, it's also where you burn your trash in the winter times, where you're cooped up until the summer times when you finally get to explore outside.

That is your world, and outside of that house or a couple other houses scattered around your village in the middle of the woods in the middle of Connecticut. And that is all you will see for probably the first 10 years of your life. That woods, that house, those handful of other wooden houses that look just like yours. In the front yard, piles of wood, piles of chopped blocks of wood because that's all you've got to keep the fire going. That is the defining characteristic of the civilization, of the organization of the communities of this place where we're standing in the year 1785.

As you grow up, you're going to hear about some exciting places. Because, what's the first thing that the children love to do? They like to hear stories. They get bored with playing in the woods, playing around their house, they say – tell me stories.

Tell me the family stories. Tell me the stories of the other families. Here, in your small hometown, everyone knows each other. So you hear about how the ships first came and brought the early settlers. How they started the river towns, and the river towns expanded. Folks kept going further and further into the woods and started other communities. You hear about the frontier wars, times when people were scared to leave their house. They only go out in groups, there was a lot of conflict. You hear about times of starvation, the hardships of the winters when you didn't have a safety net like we've got today. Back then you were dependent almost on climate to furnish you enough food and supplies. You make stockpiles to survive winter. 

Now the people that came over on ships, they also sent stuff on ships – raw materials. This is what was interesting about the New World – you weren't alone. There are folks from all over the world, England notably, that would ship stuff and that would come into some port on the East Coast that would come over on a wagon into the woods and you'd have access to those materials. Some interesting things, metal things you just don't find in the woods but you might need, and make living in the woods a little easier. So you had that faraway market, that supply chain coming in. But that didn't always make sure every family was going to make it through the tough times. You heard about the Revolution. War stories, exciting stories for kids of the Red Coats, of the participants that left from your woods, from your community, to faraway places to fight, to come back ... some didn't ... and those exciting stories.

Then you heard about the expansion that took place when the war was over. The unlimited sense of freedom, of independence, of realizing personal wealth in some instances, to build beyond what was just in your community. You are motivated by all this, bottle it all up! And the next thing you do is you get a call to go to war, the War of 1812. The British are back. Let's go! And you're thinking to yourself, ‘this is going to be my time to have some stories to share with my kids.’ 

So you get there, and you're assigned a regiment, and you're deployed, and the British are coming, the British are coming ... You're on the coast, and in this case you're in Old Saybrook. You're given a rifle, and you're given some dusty clothes, and you're sleeping in a barn, or on the bench pew of a church. And they tell you ‘The British are coming,’ but you just sit there in that harbor and you wait and watch if they come. And you are bored, because for the year  of your deployment in Old Saybrook in 1812, ready to fight, ready to get some war stories, the British never came. They didn't. You go home a little bit disillusioned with the excitement that comes with shouldering some of the, let's say, war fighting lifestyle. So then you look at yourself you say, ‘well if I can't be a soldier, and I'm already a farmer, what can I do next?’

And the thing about this new country, is that there isn't someone there telling you what to do next. You have the freedom to explore, in some ways. In feudal systems, you're given your employment by your family heritage. You have one destiny only, and that is the destiny that your ancestors did, and that you are then in the hopper to do, and diverting from that is really not encouraged nor is it in some societies allowed in the Old World. 

But in the New World, you can have a 1,000 destinies. You can do anything, and all the materials are there for you to be more than just a farmer. So you decide there's something more out there. You traveled a little bit as a soldier, but now you're back on the farm, and someone tells you, ‘You could be a maker! See all these woods? You can harness the power of these woods to make things, and the things that you make could then go on to profit you. Because there is a profit to be made.

So here, you become a maker. You start as a farmer, and now someone puts a tool in your hand and says, ‘With this tool you are empowered now to make things.' You take this tool, and become a carpenter. And for some years, you pass in the carpentry trade, an apprentice. After that, you get a call because you're doing well, working hard. ‘Hey, we need folks to come over to Harrington and put up a steeple.’ Well here's a progression – I've just taken myself from a farmer, to a carpenter, and I'm going to be a steeple raiser. So you go, and you learn the trade of joining. There are no nails. They were a rarity back then, so you really need to know how to work with wood to build things. So you raise that steeple, and you say, ‘What's next?’ Because in this country, this new country, it's up to you.

What's next? You look around, you say, ‘Well, what's something that everybody needs? That I could probably build?’ A wagon. So you become a wagon builder in Torrington. You become the best wagon builder in Torrington. You have a problem. The problem is you told all the families in Torrington, ‘When I build you a wagon, it's going to last you thirty years.’ And now you can't sell a wagon for thirty years to anyone in Torrington! So now you need, what? A new market. You go down to the Torrington community gossip place, wherever that is, probably someone's house. You say, ‘Well where's the next market? I sold a wagon to everybody in Torrington.’

 ‘Probably the town over,’ someone says, ‘You know Bristol? This new community sounds like a pretty good place to sell a wagon. It's a growing community.’ ‘I don't know anyone Bristol.’ ‘Well there's a guy there, Doctor Titus, he owes me something. He came here, and he was hungry, I gave him some salted pork to go home with, and so he owes me a credit.’ And back then, people don't have credit cards or even paper currency. It was all ledgers credit. You had a book. When someone came for something, you'd write down what they gave you, and they'd sign it, and you'd sign it, and that was a favor owed to you. So here you are looking for an ‘in’ into the Bristol market, and luckily your neighbor is owed a favor by a doctor there.

You get on your wagon, get on over to Bristol. That takes all day. You have to wake up early, because it's a day trip. You don’t know anyone in Bristol. You don’t want to stay overnight. There may be some sketchy characters there. You don’t want to get too late on the way home. You want to travel in daylight hours. So you are up, on your way, even before dawn. You know the roads around Torrington, so you can start when it's dark, before the daylight. You're figuring in your head, ‘Okay, muddy roads, maybe a good time of year to go, I can probably see Mr Titus, a 10-minute meeting, and get back to Torrington, in my bed by dark.’ You don't want to be out too late. Well, that's not how it works out!

You get to Bristol, coming up these hills in your wagon. You get to Doctor Titus’ house, and he's not home, because he's seeing patients. You got a problem. You say, ‘Well what should I do here?’ The person in the house says you can ‘wait up at the tavern.’ Great idea, right? Everyone loves waiting in taverns. Back in the day, if you were a legitimate community of the woods of Connecticut, you needed four things. You need a green, you need a church, you need a school, and of course, the tavern, which was the source of just about all entertainment and news.

So you roll up to the Able Lewis Tavern, walk up the front steps, and it creaks a little bit, and you hear the sounds of inside, of all the people, and you go into the door. And you got two directions you can go, because back then the taverns they had two rooms on the first floor, a fireplace in each room.  In one room you got a fireplace here, with benches by the fireplace. There were no tables, there was a bench by the fireplace, kitchen in the back, and they just bring you out what you want. You look at one room ... fireplace looks a little bit too rambunctious, too many people there, so then you look in the other room, maybe a few scattered people, and you just sit there. And you sit, and you wait, and they give you some cider. You don't want to get to the hard cider yet, which is your only other option. You wait, and you wait, and you wait, and you wait. You can't really get an update of where Doctor Titus is, so you just wait.

Finally, he pokes his head in. ‘I'm looking for someone who's looking for me.’ He says your name. ‘Right here!’ You stand up and show him your book that was signed, the credit he verifies. ‘That's a signature, yep, that's right. I bought some pork salt and now I got to meet.’ So he says, ‘What's wrong with you? I'm a doctor, what can I do for you?’ You tell him, ‘I'm out of clients.’ He says, ‘I thought there was something wrong. I'm a doctor. What do you want me to do about it? A business out of clients, what do you want me to do about it?’ ‘Well someone told me, Doctor Titus, you had connections in Bristol. If I was going to enter this new market, I needed to talk to somebody that can get me in this market.’ And then his face changes a little bit, because he knows about his other life. Because when you're a doctor, when you're a professional tradesman in Bristol at the time, you have a lot of spare capacity for other ventures. So Dr. Titus wasn't just a doctor. He was an investor. And everyone knew Dr. Titus could get you in a business and help keep you there in Bristol at that time.

The doctor asks a couple questions about, ‘What do you make?’ ‘Wagons.’ ‘You a good wagon maker?’ ‘I hope so, I make so many wagons I can't sell anymore because they don't break.’ And he says to himself, ‘Well this is exactly the type of person we need in Bristol, a wagon maker. Because there's something else we do here, that's quite profitable, and if I invest in you, I'm going to want you to do this thing.’ You say, ‘Well I know how to make wagons, I spent all these years getting good at making wagons, and I'm going to come to Bristol and make something different ... that doesn't sound like a very good investment to me.’ And the doctor says, ‘How about this, you come to Bristol and you start making wagons, and after some time, you come see me. We'll start making this other thing. Wagons, they got wheels made of wood, just take those wheels. Shrink them down, move them around, and you can make this other thing. And this other thing will not only take you to the next level of your craft, but it could transform you into something you never even thought about.’

And so that is an interesting way to think about where you are right now. You are born into a new country, with new opportunities, new markets. And the opportunity that you are now looking at, and experiencing firsthand, is a transformative opportunity. One tenant of what we see repeated over the history of Bristol is that the opportunity you can have, particularly in this community, is transformative ... meaning that it's not just doing more of the same business, but that you can almost transform from one destiny to another.

Dr. Titus points up, ‘There, on the wall,’ he says, ‘can you make that for me? And if you can, you're going to do good business.’ What do you think he pointed at?

This. (An authentic Bristol clock is unveiled)

This is a 200 year old clock that was made by Boardman, 12 blocks from here, in a barn. And what's unique about these Bristol clocks is that they had interchangeable parts, something we learned from a long time ago. So how many of you have actually explored one of these things? What we're going to do, as the good doctor showed his future investor, is we're going to get this clock working.

So here we go, let's take the clothes off. First thing, it's only 200 years old. This face was painted, we said, a long time ago, probably by someone that worked in a barn right up here. (Removing the hands, dial face, pendulum, and verge.) And here is the inside of a 200 year old Bristol clock, which is the mainstay of the industry that was transformative in this time. The key here is that anyone can make this, with simple tools, the templates you can get at the Clock Museum up the street. The metal, as we know, a little bit of metal imported from abroad but the reason that this is wood, is because brass was embargoed by Britain and very difficult to get. So we, we being Dr Titus and his crew, used wood gears because that's what we had on hand. So that required more seasoning, and a number of other improvements. 

We're not going to get too much into the clockenomics of the whole thing, that's for a different episode. But right here, we got to put this thing back together. Back in the day, you had one clock handmade by one person. If it broke, you had to go back to that person. If they weren't around, out of town, you're out of luck. These are interchangeable. These weights are the power, without these weights, is it going to tick? No. Let's get the power hooked up, here we go, it's moving folks. Okay, who has the long stick that wags? Now, could you find this in the West Woods? No. This is, again, some of the metal that you needed, stolen or bought, to get this thing working. Before we put it on, we had to combine it with something else to make the magic. Who has the verge?

They call this country mechanics because everything you need to make this thing tick was in the woods, or could be made in the woods using simple tools. So we're going to slip this down here, and it slips right in. First we're going to hang the verge, show in a second delicate pieces. You'll notice the design of the whole thing was so that it could survive a pretty rough wagon trip. Hang it (the verge) very carefully, that there we go. Okay, now it's a little bit delicate to put this (the hands) back on, but let's at least put the hour hand back on. See, that's 3:00 time. 

So this is how this genius of country mechanics worked,, which again, was not invented here, but one could say perfected here. You'd start this whole pendulum and the cadence, or the equal parts of the time, would be kept by the verge and the movement. As we saw in the trailer of the escape wheel, and the purpose of this escape wheel was to make sure that every time it went from the left to the right, it had equal left and equal right and that's what gave you accurate time. All right, well that's not exciting enough. Best part is when it goes ding. So this is called the Count Wheel, and you'll notice the Count Wheel is not evenly notched. You've got more notches this way, and they're spaced out a little bit more here. Why is that? You're going to see. So I'm going to cheat, that's okay, we're going to get this thing to go ding. And I want you to watch that escape wheel ticker, ready to get double time on this escape wheel? Here we go Ding! Ding! Ding!

Pretty cool because you don't have any other power than some dead weights down here. So it rang three times. Why? Because that's the space between those two notches (on the Count Wheel). But let's say it went beyond that time. We want to get to the next hour here. There, we go. Look at that go again. This device well may have been created in other parts of the world using metal. The fact that you made it here in wood, using trees you got from around the parts in Bristol. Lots of people could do this, lots of people could make this, paint it, put it on the market. But what we did here in this part, was something they didn't do anywhere else in the world. I made this, I sold it to you. When it breaks, you got to call me. 

Interchangeable parts. So when this broke, guess what we do? We interchange the parts. So how does it work? Well, you got to take all the stuff off, you just put on. Let's go up close with a relic of Bristol history. Here it is, we're going to hold it. (the clock movement) And there it is ... the wooden wheels, cherrywood, back of which is a cheap pine punched template, front of which has all the good stuff, right, the expensive stuff. You got the escape wheel, rare metal didn't come from around here, so you got to buy it. The Count Wheel and the ticker. There's real names to these things, but go with me for the moment. But most importantly, inside look at that ... gears, gears, gears, gears. Each inventor had different gears there. What I'm going to do, is leave this up here. Everyone can look at it. 

My clock broke, right? So my clock broke, I'm in the middle of the woods, what am I going to do? I can take it to expensive repair shop, or I can get my delivery here, and look what just came for Christmas ... look at that, interchangeable parts. And these wood gears, unlike that one, have all the right teeth. And so this (the interchangeable part that was delivered), will go right in, right there. Hook everything back up, and you just got your clock fixed. So here is not just an innovation, because the innovating was done someplace else over much longer time.

But this, here, this whole system, what I just sold you, that's what came from Bristol. The ability to give you time, not just time as a luxury, as something that works, sometimes that doesn't. I just gave you a system to keep time in your house that is what everyone needs – reliable. Because if something breaks, with interchangeable parts, someone will come and fix it real quick. It can't be useful, this whole clock thing, in the beginning, it can't be useful if it's just an ornament. It is useful if it's reliable. To run a business, you do need an understanding, if not a little bit of influence, of (the precise measurement of) time. But it's not useful, if it doesn't run right. Everyone loves a car, needs a car, but if it doesn't run, what's the point? Reliable time.

So why Bristol? Why can't I just do this (make reliable clocks) in Torrington, where I'm from? Power. Water power. To cut all this wood, cut these pieces, you need machines which are powered by belts, which are tied to the ceiling, which go over there, which go down into a river of some kind. Bristol had hills, and hills give you gravity. Every place has water. Gravity and water together make rivers. Rivers flowing through, if you can capture them, give you power. Mills? Water power, to power these things. Some other towns had just one river, maybe two. Remember, if you have a finite resource, it's usually controlled by a finite number of people. In Bristol you had so much access to water power that you could be a small shop and get started without owing too much credit to anyone else. And that ability to get in at the bottom, in an industry that was not only growing, but also valuable and reliable, gave Bristol that magic pixie dust of the original expansion.

So to wrap this up, we go home thinking, ‘This is my future. I'm no longer a farmer, no longer a carpenter, no longer a wagon maker, I am a soon-to-be clock maker!’ After some time with your wagon shop here in the North End of Polkville, Doctor Titus pays you another visit. He says, ‘I see you've done well for yourself as a wagon maker. You thought about my offer? To be a clock maker?’ 

And you say, ‘Yes sir, I am.’ So he says, ‘The thing about clocks, is you need an edge. Because what I just told you, anyone else here can do, and everyone else here is doing, so for you to get in on this interchangeable part clock business, if you really want to succeed, and beat out these other guys ... because it is competitive you can't just have a nice case and hope that the case sells better than the rest. You can't just figure out the cost of all these little parts here, and figure, ‘oh if I just save on this little piece here I'll sell a clock for a dollar less. You need an edge, an edge in business. Especially when you're starting up.’ And so you ask the doctor, ‘You seem to me, you may know where I can find an edge to this whole thing.’ 

And so he tells you something that changed your life. He tells you that there is an inventor in Bristol who is considered the most ingenious inventor of clocks ever, widely recognized. And that if you are able to tap into the knowledge of this guy, he will give you that edge. You say, ‘Well is he just going to give it to me? I mean, that's not how usually these things work. You need to offer some sort of transaction, some incentive.’ 

And the doctor tells you, he looks you in the eye, and says, ‘Well I'll tell you, I'll tell you this. This inventor, this genius really good at making clocks, is not so good at selling them, or the business side of things. So right now, this guy, he's in jail down in New York. And somebody got to bail him out, and he doesn't quite have a lot of friends around here. So I figure if you go down to New York, with some of that extra cash you got from your wagon business, and you offer to bail this guy out, you could cut him a deal. ‘I'll bail you out, and you work with me to make some kind of new clock ... you invent something that gives me an edge.’ 

And with that, Doctor Titus gave John Birge the mission to go down to Brooklyn, New York and bail out Joseph Ives.

 CONTINUE THE STORY >     Listen to Podcast Episode 1, "The Offer"