The Traveling Clock with Forty-Eight Performers
Stephen Engle’s enormous clock toured for decades before disappearing into storage and returning to a Pennsylvania museum.
Stephen Engle’s clock needed room for an entire cast. Forty-eight moving figures shared a structure about eleven feet tall, along with two organ movements and a device for showing astronomical relationships. The finished machine weighed more than a thousand pounds.
A Show Scheduled by the Minute
Engle, an inventor from Hazleton, Pennsylvania, spent roughly twenty years making the clock. Its scenes unfolded at different points in the hour, giving an audience a reason to keep watching after reading the time.
Figures representing stages of life moved above the dial. Continental soldiers appeared with Molly Pitcher as an organ played patriotic music. Later in the hour, biblical figures entered another scene. The clock combined timekeeping, mechanical theater, music, and an astronomical display in one cabinet.
Engle patented the astronomical mechanism, called a tellurian. It modeled the positions of the moon, constellations, and zodiac in relation to the rotating Earth.
From the Road to a Barn
Promoter Jacob Reid advertised the clock as the Eighth Wonder of the World. He offered a large cash challenge to anyone who could produce a clock that did more. The claim helped sell a traveling attraction that toured the eastern United States for about seventy years.
Moving and operating such a machine repeatedly took a toll. It disappeared from public view in 1951 and was eventually found in a barn in the 1980s.
Museum staff and volunteers restored the clock’s complicated sequence of movements. It now belongs to the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania, where the figures perform in the same cabinet that once traveled from town to town.
Keep exploring
Take these stories with you.
Open Hidden Here to see the stories around you. Choose a place on the map, read what happened there, or listen while you explore. Optional nearby alerts can point out stories you might otherwise miss.
Discover thousands of stories across the U.S.
Create a free account to read the full stories and listen to five of them. Passport adds unlimited listening.
See how Hidden Here works 
Sources & photograph
Adapted from the Hidden Here story catalog. Explore the historical records behind this story.
