Ugears Old Clock Tower

The Old Clock Tower mini-model by Ugears brings a charming medieval atmosphere into your home or office. This beautiful DIY wooden clock tower model is a mechanical mechanism in the form of a tower with clock face, moving gears, a moving pendulum, whimsical characters, and a weather vane on top. Scroll the large gear to set the hands of the clock, the pendulum, and the weather vane in motion. The weather vane is a trumpeter holding on to a banner blowing in the wind. For comic effect, a man is suspended from the clock's spinning minute hand, holding on for dear life. Another man climbs a ladder below the clock—perhaps a cleaner or clock repairman? Behind the clock a suspicious-looking figure enters a hidden door—a thief storing his loot in the clock tower, or maybe a hunchback, bringing his lunch back? Invent your own story as you spin the gears and watch the mechanism come to life.

Clock towers occupied a central place in the life of medieval and Renaissance European cities. Invented in the 11th century, clock towers could sound the alarm in case of emergency; call people to worship, weddings or funerals; put the wealth or importance of a city on public display; and more prosaically, let townsfolk know what time it was, in an age when most people didn't own a watch or have a clock at home. Clock towers often featured interesting decorative elements and innovative engineering in the clockworks. Most medieval and Renaissance clock towers have been lost to time, war, or modernization, but there are still a few that survive in European cities—for example the Torre dell'Orologio in Venice's St. Mark's Square, the Prague Astronomical Clock with its procession of twelve apostles, or the Zytglogge in Bern, Switzerland.