Dear All,

I’m conscious that we have wandered away from Synchronome but I feel we are all happy playing in the same broad sandpit. I hope so. Simon has some great material on Magneta you can find through his links. It links the story to the clocks themselves, with images. I was working up material on Magneta quite a few years ago, which is still all text-based, without any clock images (!) and you can find it in the first of the links below. This is primary research, very much unfinished, unpublished, and my copyright. I am very happy to share it with everyone here, of course, but I would ask everyone to respect my copyright and the effort put in. I hope to incorporate the material in future publications.

On Bowell, I lectured a while back in several different places, and the simplest summary of that material finally appeared in AH in March 2016. The second link takes you to the relevant article.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/di1o0pqzkeowtke/Magneta_History%20draft%20april%202010.pdf?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/y6i8huxyxvznkab/Nye%20on%20Bowell.pdf?dl=0

All the best

James

Jim,

At Clockworks there is a wall dedicated to Bowell, and as well as the clocks on show there are some in the store as well, from memory. One can see traces of Molden’s plans for a time distribution group in lots of these, with the names SECC and Magneta cropping up singly or in conjunction. I think we have 3 or 4 ‘transitional’ SECC/Magneta clocks. Molden bought the Greenwich Time Company in the Great War when it was confiscated owing to its German parentage (Normal-Zeit of Berlin) and then added SECC, Magneta (same reason as Greenwich Time) and then later had a temporary stake in Lowne. For a fair time one is essentially talking about the same stable, with a few different brands on the dials. Magneta emerged as the brand to retain, and this was later acquired by Booth in his BVC business. It’s hard to be certain where any of the clocks were actually made – but it was probably in Carteret St, two which one assumes any kit from the SECC Goswell Road workshops would have been taken. Probably puts the clocks in the mid 1920s?

In perspective, and considering the commercial angle, the pre-BVC businesses of Magneta and the others under the Molden banner were insignificant, and Gent and Synchronome would have had the bulk of the business before 1939. With BVC, TMC, TR etc, the scene shifted dramatically post-war. There were systems like those at the Bank of England or Shell Centre with over 1,000 dials. Equipment destruction policies have given us a distorted fossil record.

All the best!

James