Fourth Floor – Independence Hall Tower – Showing Bell Tower – Clock Room.Wenzel J. Hess, photographer, May 13, 1929.
All these years, when we thought we were celebrating a shrine to 18th-century independence, we were inadvertently confirming something quite different: the 19th-century obsession with time. And it’s taken a toll on how we understand the past.
After a recent restoration, the giant clock in the bell tower at Independence Hall will tell time again. But it won’t tell us much about the 18th century. Many assume this tower and its clock date back to the tower of the 1750s, and believe that both were present at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in the 1770s—but they were not. The original tower at Independence Hall had no clock. Time was, literally, pushed off to the side, as seen in the illustrated engraving from 1778. The State House’s original bell tower provided a sound track for life in the 18th-century city, one measured not in terms of hours but by civic events: ascensions of royalty, meetings of legislature, protests portending revolution. One thing the 18th-century tower didn’t tell—and wasn’t intended to do—was time. Back then, the relatively mundane act of telling time was simply not valued enough to give over the most prominent, symbolic steeple in the city.
"A N.W. view of the state house in Philadelphia taken 1778," by Charles Willson Peale. (detail) The Library of Congress.
That original tower might have been important, but it was also rotten. By the time of the British surrender, the upper wooden sections had been pulled down for fear of their falling down. And for nearly fifty years, no tower rose above the rooftops at 5th and Chestnut. When William Strickland proposed a design for a “restored” steeple in 1828, his idea only vaguely resembled the lost original. According to historian Charlene Mires, a lawyer with a nearby office complained about Strickland’s initial design: “No man will be able to look at that building with its new steeple and be able to persuade himself that it represents the ancient State House.”
Strickland hadn’t set out to actually re-create the original steeple. At the level where four dignified windows once looked out, Strickland placed four glaring, back-lit faces of a giant clock to look at. In this new, rising commercial/industrial Philadelphia, Strickland’s steeple reminded the citizenry of their freedom, but conflated that message with a something new: Philadelphians, Americans, were falling under the spell of time. And it was changing their lives.
George G. Foster, a journalist from New York, visited the steeple in the mid-century: “Clink-clank! what have we here! We go through this little door and stand in the center of the Illuminated Clock! … The wheels are as broad as mill-stones and the weights are attached to cables strong enough to fasten a steamboat to the wharf. … The pendulum, of the size of a steamer’s walking-beam, moves slowly to and fro, once in two seconds, clink clank! Morning and noon and night, Summer and Winter, up here alone in its mysterious and silent realm of wheels and springs and machinery, ever sits the brooding Spirit of the Clock.”
By the middle of the 19th century, the Spirit of Independence had begun to join with (and possibly succumb to) this “Spirit of the Clock.” According to Foster, “that which stamps itself most legibly and universally upon the [Philadelphia] character, the manners, the faces, the very costume, of its inhabitants, is the business of buying and selling, turning everything to the best possible account, and seizing hold of everything instantly by the utility handle. … The very clock on the State-House steeple appears to be calculating how much it can make by striking…”
Foster exaggerated, of course. But other Philadelphians were not in their calculations using time in the name of progress. As Philadelphia barreled forward to its destiny as a manufacturing center, time became increasingly monitored and manipulated. The city that proudly counted down its first century of independence in years, hours, and finally minutes, would soon count among its innovators the Quaker engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, who made efficiency a science. In Taylor’s famous time-motion studies, he broke factory jobs into component parts, used a stopwatch to measure workers’ motions, again and again, to study, then systematically enhance, productivity and profit.
When Strickland designed the tower of Independence Hall in 1828, he had no clue how profoundly the industrial mindset would come to transform the city and the nation. Strickland couldn’t have known that “Taylorization,” as it came to be called, would define the American way of life. He might have been naïve about the significance of a giant, four-faced clock in the steeple atop what was then and is now the nation’s most revered shrine. But we, with the benefit of hindsight and history, have no excuse.
The clock in the tower at Independence Hall is about the 18th century—by proximity only. Will future restorations acknowledge that fact? Time will tell.
Thomas W. Dyott, Snake Oil, Soda Water and the Perennially Seductive Philadelphia Bottle
View of the Glass works of T. W. Dyott at Kensington on the Delaware nr Philada., Lithograph by Kennedy & Lucas after William L. Breton, 1831. (The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Everyone in America, it seemed, wanted to wrap their fingers around a bottle. What poured from the bottle didn’t seem to matter all that much, so long as it made the consumers feel good about themselves. It might be shoe polish, patent medicine or whiskey—something, anything, that was cheap to make and marketable by whatever claims it took to sell. When it came down to it, the bottle’s contents were almost secondary to a steady, affordable supply of pocket-sized, glass containers. Without bottles, manufacturers and merchants had no reason to create demand and no way to satisfy the desires of clambering consumers.
"The Times." By H. R. Robinson after E. W. Clay, 1837. Detail. (The Library of Congress)
Thomas W. Dyott understood this dilemma, and overcame it. He called himself a doctor, which Dyott was not, but he was an operator, an entrepreneur and an ambitious visionary. As a poor, young arrival from England, Dyott polished shoes and mixed his own bootblack after hours. He sold as much as he could make and soon realized that while polish might put food on the table, cures would get him food and the table. Dyott added “M.D.” to his name and marketed and sold elixirs including “Vegetable Nervous Cordial,” “Infallible Toothache Drops,” and “Stomachic Bitters.” Before long, Dyott’s drug store at 2nd and Race Street had become the headquarters for the largest patent medicine businessman in the United States, with sales agents pounding the pavement in a dozen states.
As long as Dyott depended on others for a steady supply of bottles, his success was at their mercy. So he bought and breathed new life into the old Kensington Glass Works, located where a creek called Gunner’s Run flowed into the Delaware River. Dyott ramped up production to 8,000 pounds of glass each and every day. He undercut everyone else’s prices; he made and supplied quality bottles for his own ventures as well as those of his competition.
By the 1830s, the 400-acre Glass Works of T. W. Dyott grew into a company town for his labor force of up to 400, about half of whom were apprentices, some as young as six. Dyott demanded work, but he provided housing, healthcare, education, recreation, religion and rules. Dyottville had a farm to sustain his workforce and he guaranteed employment all year around. His factory made bottles in clear and tinted glass featuring images in relief of everything from the American flag to cornucopia, to everyone among the powerful, rich and famous: Washington, Franklin, Swedish singer Jenny Lind and, on occasion, Dyott himself.
As he grew richer, Dyott became known for excess and extravagance. And when he launched a private bank—The Manual Labor Bank–Dyott brought to bear his skill as a marketer and manipulator. He “induced a great many people, principally of the middling interest and poorer classes, to deposit their earnings” and issued paper money with presidential portraits, his own signature, and the assurance each note was “secured in trust.”
But when even the best banks collapsed during the Panic of 1837 and the economic depression that followed, so did Dyott’s Manual Labor Bank and his grand version of the American dream. In the celebrity trial that followed, the commonwealth charged Dyott with “defrauding the community” and “fraudulent insolvency.” Sixty-eight witnesses testified against him and the 70-year-old was sentenced to Eastern State Penitentiary. The factory closed and Dyottville became a ghost town.
In the 1840s, a fad for plain and flavored mineral waters spurred new and an even greater demand for bottles. Another immigrant entrepreneur, Eugene Roussel, took over Dyott’s shuttered factory. (Roussel soon diversified from perfumes to soda water, and soon distributed more than 15,000 bottles of his soda water, every day.) Meanwhile, investors widened Gunner’s Run into the Aramingo Canal to support Kensington’s burgeoning industrial landscape, which produced everything: paint, pottery, rope, stoves, wagons and ships. By the end of the 19th century, Dyott’s factory, by then acknowledged as the city’s oldest glass house, was still producing bottles.
In the 20th century, I-95 came through the Dyott site, which both obliterated its past above ground but left behind opportunities for some interesting industrial archeology. A recent dig reported no bottles, but even more important finds among the foundations that will help sketch in the larger story.
Where are the Dyott bottles today?
It turns out that they continue to have a life of their own. The Philadelphia Museum of Art holds a few, as do some collectors. Folks liked to wrap their fingers around Dyott’s bottles then, and, as it turns out, they still do. In 2010, a Dyott bottle nicknamed the ‘Firecracker Flask’ set a world record at auction, selling for more than $100,000.
After all these years, Dyott bottles still have a way of making their owners feel special.