This post is part of a series, Reading Time at HSNY, written by our librarians. Today’s post was written by our Fall 2025 intern, Natalie Zak.

This past fall, I had the pleasure of serving as the Library Intern at the Horological Society of New York (HSNY), helping process a portion of the archival materials held in the Society’s backroom on 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. I was given free reign at the start to choose what kind of subcollection I’d like to build, based on my interests. As a recent Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) graduate, this was a daunting task.

We are taught that as archivists, we must abide by the original order where and when we can, arranging and processing collections as they are received, rather than creating categories where there weren’t any before. However, this principle, more formally referred to as respect des fonds, does not apply to most of the archival materials currently held at HSNY.

There is no original order to these materials; they arrived in an array of boxes, each filled to the brim with a miscellany of horological ephemera from the comprehensive collection of Fortunat Mueller-Maerki. My project, and future interns’ projects, aim to categorize it, creating as we go artificial subcollections, so that library patrons may one day be able to access and make use of these incredibly diverse materials for personal and professional research. So, in September, I began making my way through the piles, setting aside brightly colored pamphlets, spiral-bound booklets, and catalogs that caught my eye. What I found, upon assessing my own personal pile, was that I had been gravitating towards library, museum, and institutional ephemera that documented conversations happening within the field. This included everything from library catalogs to subject bibliographies to museum brochures, with symposia and convention materials mixed in as well.

Initially, the relationship between these items appeared tenuous. Does a bibliography of Swiss scholar Alfred Chapuis’ writings belong in the same collection as, say, a museum catalog from Nezu Museum in Japan? The answer: Yes, yes it does. Both Chapuis’ writings and the museum exhibition contributed to public consciousness and interest in horology.

A discipline (like horology) is sustained by conversation, collaboration, and interest. And in order to create interest, horologists and collectors must bring members of the public into the conversation. In my opinion, this relationship is best exemplified by the HSNY’s collection of museum and exhibition catalogs because they exist on the boundary of public and private. By taking a closer look, we see ways in which institutions and members of the discipline have contextualized their craft to appeal to new audiences. They move beyond simply asking people to behold a beautiful clock. Rather, they ask people to behold the subject of time itself.

Time appears repeatedly throughout these materials as something learned, staged, feared, explained, and even moralized. The exhibitions in this collection move beyond simple presentation of clocks and watches, instead exploring the astronomical and mechanical origins of timekeeping; the historical and cultural conditions that shape our understanding; and the spectacular, confounding devices that are born from a deep appreciation for time.

Time as a Way of Knowing the Universe

One theme that arose as I made my way through the catalogs is the presentation of time as a way of knowing the universe. Across the museum catalogs and brochures, time is repeatedly defined not as an abstract unit, but as a way of reading the universe — derived from planetary motion, calibrated against the sun, and materialized in instruments that translate celestial order into human understanding.

A catalog for the 1974 “Période archaïque et antiquités” exhibition at Musée international d’horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, is a clear example of this conception of time. It begins not with clocks, but rather with a planetarium (images 1-2). Framing time as a cosmological problem, the exhibition presents early timekeeping as born from, roughly translated, “the need to align human life with solar and lunar cycle.”

The language the catalog uses is urgent and impactful too, drawing in potential audiences by connecting their experience of time with a higher purpose: “The movement of the heavens imposed order on human life.” Time is presented as something derived from observation of cosmic regularities, not human convention or intervention. This is something greater than us, heavenly even. We simply must do the only thing we can: “Go and observe.”

From La Chaux-de-Fonds, this way of presenting time travels outward. In brochures for the Eise Eisinga Planetarium in the Netherlands, the planetarium itself is the horological instrument: a space designed to teach time through the visible order of the heavens (image 3). But it’s more than just the planetarium; it’s the story of why it was made that matters.

In 1774, the Frisian wool-comber Eise Eisinga began building the planetarium that now bears his name in his own home in Franeker to prevent astronomical panic. A local preacher, Eelco Alta, circulated a pamphlet predicting that an upcoming conjunction of the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter would pull the Earth out of its orbit and bring about catastrophe. Alarm spread quickly among the public.

Eisinga, trained in mathematics and astronomy, set out to counter that fear by constructing a working model of the solar system. He built a fully mechanical planetarium in a private living room, driven by a pendulum clock, modeling real planetary motion. Through it, he demonstrated the regular, predictable motion of the planets and showed that no such disaster would occur (images 4-5). Timekeeping here is more than just measuring motion by observing the planets. It’s a tool for cosmological explanation, public reassurance, and a way of regulating a model of the universe itself.

Thus, as is written in the brochure for Kulturmuseum St.Gallen’s 2024 exhibition on mathematician and horologist Jost Bürgi, titled “Jost Bürgi (1552–1632) – Schlüssel zum Kosmos”: “Through meticulous celestial observations and precise calculations, a dramatic shift in the worldview of European cultural history began to take shape” (images 6-7). The “dramatic shift” is not philosophical alone, but mechanical, rooted in Europeans’ increasing ability to measure time with enough precision to support empirical astronomy.

If the planetarium presents time as a way of explaining the cosmos to the public, the brochures for the Jost Bürgi exhibition and the Museum of Dutch Clock’s “Seven centuries of time-keeping in the Netherlands” exhibit, from 2008, move that cosmological framework directly into the mechanics of timekeeping itself. In the Kulturmuseum St. Gallen brochure on Bürgi, precision is framed not as an end in itself, but as a prerequisite for knowing the heavens. Bürgi’s work is positioned within a moment when increasingly exact time measurement became essential to astronomical observation, navigation, and calculation, collapsing the distance between celestial theory and mechanical practice.

The Museum of Dutch Clocks exhibition takes this one step further, embedding astronomical knowledge into objects meant for everyday use (images 8-9). Longcase clocks, planisphere clocks, and other domestic timepieces display the position of the sun in the zodiac, the length of day and night, and even world time, folding planetary motion into the rhythms of daily life. Here, the universe is no longer something merely observed or demonstrated. It is engineered, housed, and kept running on the wall or in the corner of a room, making cosmological order a constant presence within ordinary timekeeping.

Time as Performance, Illusion, and Delight

If implicating the public in a higher, unknowable (yet, as we discussed, ultimately knowable) power isn’t enough to pique their interest in the discipline, then we turn to the spectacular. Flashiness sells, and as you will see, some exhibitions lean into movement, sound, and illusion, presenting time not as something to be calculated, but rather as something to be seen, heard, and felt. As accuracy recedes into the background, what comes forward instead is delight.

Catalogs for automaton exhibits encapsulate this perfectly. La magie des automates au XIXᵉ siècle, a temporary exposition hosted by a bank in Brussels (29 April–18 May 1993) featured automata from private collections, not objects meant for measurement, but machines that imitate life. As the catalog notes, the term automaton became specialized “to designate machines that imitate the movements of living beings” in the 18th century.

The catalog descriptions linger not on gears or escapements, but instead on coordinated gestures and sequences of motion: singing birds that turn their heads and open their beaks (image 10); a snake charmer whose arms, head, and serpent move together in a controlled rhythm (image 11). Time here is neither abstract nor numerical; it’s experienced as sequence, pacing, and repetition. These machines don’t measure time — they perform it.

A similar logic governs an animated floral clock in a catalog for Nezu Museum (image 12). The catalog describes flowers arranged in a radiating form that rotate continuously, while twelve small petals below open and close in succession. The rotation of decorative elements, we are told, “creates a visual rhythm that marks the flow of time,” giving the impression that the entire structure is alive with movement. Here, time is aestheticized. Motion itself becomes the sign of temporal passage, and ornament carries as much meaning as mechanism. The clock functions as a moving artwork, where animation replaces precision as the primary mode of engagement.

Sound introduces yet another dimension of performed time in materials in HSNY’s collection, covering the Britannic Organ, which was originally intended for installation on the sister ship to the Titanic but ended up in the collection of the Museum für Musikautomaten in Seewen, Switzerland (images 13-14). Although capable of remarkable technical precision, the organ is framed primarily through its ability to activate sound in real time. Music is triggered and regulated by clockwork mechanisms, reproducing performances through rolls that unfold in carefully controlled sequences.

The most overtly spectacular examples appear in “Artistry in Time: Decorative Timepieces of Imperial China,” an exhibition at EPCOT, Walt Disney World, in 1987-1988 (image 15). These clocks, originally from The Palace Museum in Beijing, were designed explicitly to entertain. Musical signals mark the hour and quarter-hour, setting elaborate sequences into motion: pagodas rise, figures rotate, fountains flow, animals move (image 16).

These are items that were “designed not only to tell time but to delight the court through elaborate automata, musical elements, and richly symbolic decoration.” Despite timekeeping being considered widely to be a necessary act, symbolism, display, and grandiosity have always mattered when it comes to capturing the public’s hearts and minds.

Ultimately, what emerges from this material is not a story about objects alone, but about mediation. These catalogs document moments when horology steps outside of itself and asks how time might be made compelling or even pleasurable to those without technical training. The answers vary. Sometimes time is elevated, aligned with the heavens and cosmic order. Sometimes it is disciplined. Other times, it is animated, musical, and theatrical. But in each case, the goal is the same: to make time legible by staging it.

Seen together, these exhibitions reveal a discipline that has long understood the limits of technical authority. Horology does not sustain itself through accuracy alone. It sustains itself through performance. Planetariums, automata, musical instruments, and decorative clocks are not peripheral to this history. They are evidence of how timekeeping has been repeatedly embedded in narrative and shared experience so that it may continue to be culturally meaningful.

Reading Time at HSNY: Staging Time for the Masses

Time as a Way of Knowing the Universe

Time as Performance, Illusion, and Delight

Reading Time at HSNY: Serving Up Seconds