Time-keeping, precision and Time Guns of Madras
The
Standard time clock in the Madras
Observatory has set the time since 1802.
All of Madras knew it was Indian Standard Time by the sound of the 8
p.m. from Fort St George.
The Observatory clock was connected to the Fort time gun. The
time gun is now obsolete.
On the Dolphins Nose point
at 6 p.m. sharp a time gun fired to tell the exact time. It was discontinued in 1871 but a Mr. Narasinga Row offered to pay for the firing expenses. Later a flag was used for the time signal.
Keeping time for Madras
Few
today remember that, in its day, P.Orr and Sons was more than the
leading watch and clock shop in South India; that it was the South's
leading silversmiths, goldsmiths and jewellers, its clientele anyone
who was anybody in South India, from Governors to Zamindars to those
just plain rich or powerful.Just South of and across The Mail's driveway is what for a short period had been another of `J' Anantharamakrishnan's acquisitions of the 1950s. He sold the company, but not the property, to a friend in 1967. The company, P.Orr and Sons, timekeepers to Madras, was yet another of those businesses with a long history entwined with the commercial development of South India in the 19th and 20th Centuries. But few today remember that, in its day, P.Orr's was more than the leading watch and clock shop in South India; that it was the South's leading silversmiths, goldsmiths and jewellers, its clientele anyone who was anybody in South India, from Governors to Zamindars to those just plain rich or powerful.
Dating to Robert Chisholm's later period, when, to the traditional Indo-Saracenic, he added Kerala-`capped' towers, is the P.Orr & Sons building, its tower rather drastically altered and its façade changed to some extent in more recent times.
The three-faced clock in this 1873 (or 9?)
building used to be connected to the Madras
Observatory and, in the heyday of the company, would chime the
exact Indian Standard Time on the hour, to the Madras public. Today, it
still provides the Mount Road bustle the time, but the corrections made
on the hour every hour are a thing of the past.The building, however, does not date to Peter Orr's stewardship. Peter Orr, a watch and chronometer maker from Scotland, and his younger brother Alexander, an Edinburgh lawyer, were in their forties - late to be seeking your fortunes in the East - when they arrived in Madras in 1843. No sooner on landing, they joined George Gordon & Co., Popham's Broadway, who had been in the watch business in Madras from 1792. In 1849, the Orr's took over the business from a retiring Gordon and relocated it on 6-8 Mount Road, presumably the present site. Here, Peter Orr's Sons, James and Robert - who trained in watch making in Switzerland - joined the firm in the 1850s and, in 1863, became partners in what became P. Orr and Sons. Orr senior went back to England in 1866, James died in 1869 and it was left to Robert Orr to nurture the firm. Which he did so successfully that it not only raised that splendid building it remains in - though now little tended - but also established an all-India reputation and one beyond the seas as well.
What Robert Orr developed, his nephew Edward Orr, who had joined the company in 1888 and become Managing Director 10 years later, made a Madras landmark. Edward Orr himself became a person of significance in Madras, eminent enough to serve in the Madras Legislative Council. On his death in 1913, the partnership became a private limited company with the new owners, all erstwhile directors, active in the day-to-day running of the company; it was a tradition at P.Orr's that there would always have to be a Director on the premises during working hours right round the year! This ensured that Madras Society shopping here was always served by someone almost on that society - and not by a salesman, no matter the latter's immaculate white suit, just the right tie, shoes that shone and impeccable manners. From owner-directors' hands, P.Orr's passed into the Amalgamations Group and then, in 1967, Anantharamakrishnan sold the business to his friend Karumuthu Thiaigaraja Chettiar, in whose family the business remains, but with the property strongly disputed even after recent court rulings.
Chisholm's 60 feet by 30 showroom that was the chief attraction of P.Orr's building in its heyday was a veritable Victorian wonderland of ornate chandeliers, floors with shining tiles, richly embellished walls that were an "art gallery" of the coats of arms and heraldry of British and Indian royalty and nobility, and, above all, scores of ornamental showcases, with their glass gleaming and their rosewood and teak polished almost every day. And in the showcases, themselves works of art, were the riches of P.Orr's, ranging from watches to silverware, from precious stones to jewellery.
There also used to be renowned Diamond Table, the display of rubies and jade that the Rangoon branch regularly supplied, and case after case of watches, chronometers and silverware. Today, no longer can you see here the Golconda or the 68-carat Guntakkal Diamond, nor displays of silver and gold table service or trophies.
Today, it's back to roots - and that's watches. Behind it all there also survives what used to be a fascinating horolgical workshop, a maze on different levels, with hundreds of stools and workbenches where hundreds of employees pored over the intricacies of the innards of watches and clocks, while at other levels jewellery was created, gold and silver engraved.
There was a time when P.Orr's even went beyond its traditional business, in an unconscious reflection of Peter Orr's engineering roots which, from time to time, manifested themselves in some new creation of his - like his mechanical process to work the city's punkahs by steam! During that short excursion, P.Orr's assembled bicycles, served as agents for Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Wolseley cars, sold and serviced sophisticated surveying equipment and even had an arms and ammunition section, where arms repair was a specialty. Over the years, and particularly after Independence, department after department was closed down and it is with watches the firm is primarily associated once more.
An almost annual visitor to Madras is John M. Davies who started his career as a convenanted officer in P.Orr's in 1946 and left as a Director when the company changed hands in the 1950s. Davies later joined Garrard's of London, the Crown Jewellers, where he retired as Deputy Managing Director. P.Orr's representatives, he once told me, travelled throughout the country, created a giant sales and service network and "made P.Orr and Sons a major name in the Indian jewellery business." The other all-India presence of the company was with P.Orr clocks; in the many parts of India he's visited over the years, Davies has found P.Orr clocks still ticking away in clubs, offices and homes. "There's still many a grandfather clock of ours still telling Indian Standard Time," he recalls. But in the Mount Road premises, the glamour of the past has gone. And so has history.
A
Pioneer of PrecisionCaptain Henry Kater, FRS
Largely forgotten today Captain Henry Kater (1777-1835) conducted pioneering researches in England in the early 19th century to improve the precision of weights and measures. Associated with this was the development of the reversible pendulum for gravity measurements. Kater was actively involved in the Royal Society of London and closely associated with scientists whose names are still familiar today such as Thomas Young, Humphry Davy and William Hyde Wollaston.
When his son Edward died, many of Kater’s relics passed to his other son, Henry Herman Kater, in Australia. Some were presented to Sydney Observatory and the University of Sydney in 1873 and others were dispersed. This display brings together some of these historic relics of Captain Kater’s scientific work for the first time in more than a hundred years.
Who was Captain Kater?
Kater’s name is recalled today by occasional references to Kater’s compass and Kater’s pendulum. The two instruments indicate the interconnected areas of geodesy and metrology in which he made his principal scientific contributions.
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Experiments in Madras The illustration shows the operation of measuring the swing of the pendulum in comparison to a clock pendulum. The measurements were carried out early in 1821 and quickly sent off for publication in the Philosophical Transactions. Kater was born in Bristol in 1777, joined the army at 22 and was sent to India where he assisted William Lambton in surveying for the Madras government. After some years he returned to England due to ill health, and was placed on half pay in 1814. Later that year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. Kater was active as an officer of the Society as well as engaging in its scientific programs. He was especially engaged in precision measurements relating to the standardisation of weights and measures. In connection with this work Kater devised the reversible pendulum. |
He also made a number contributions to astronomy, including devising a method for graduating circles and the inventing the floating collimator. Kater corresponded widely on technical subjects with numerous British and European scientists. He died in London in 1835.
The Royal Society of London
Kater was elected a Fellow in December 1814 when Sir Joseph Banks was near the end of his 42 year reign as President. Kater had already published three papers in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, and published a dozen or so more there up to 1831.
He served as Treasurer for several years as well as contributing to scientific programs of the Society, notably his pendulum work for which he was awarded the Copley Medal in 1817. He gave the Society’s Bakerian Lecture in 1821 on his researches into the best shape and kind of steel for compass needles.
Kater’s contributions to precision measurement were widely recognised by election to many of the leading scientific societies in Europe and America. He was awarded the Royal Astronomical Society’s Medal in 1831.