Christine of Mirabilis.ca posts about a 54-minute video here on youtube, put there by a person in Great Britain with the pseudonym trady. It's a Solemn High from 1941 by a Servite priest, narrated by then-Mgr. Fulton J. Sheen.
Trady states: Unfortunately due to size restrictions at Youtube around 20 mins have been cut from the original. However, I hope to upload a full version at Google soon or perhaps here when Youtube improves its director accounts. In addition to the cuts I have added new captions and edited the opening credits. The credits had deteriorated quite badly in the original. I retyped what I could see of them and faded them in at the beginning and at the end. Other than this the film remains largely unchanged.
Solemn High Mass, St Patrick’ Day, 1941, Old St Patrick's, Chicago
(not the youtube Mass nor the youtube church)
The comput ecclesiastique (ecclesiastical computer) of the Strasbourg Cathedral clock: images, audio and .pdf filesSolemn High Mass, St Patrick’ Day, 1941, Old St Patrick's, Chicago
(not the youtube Mass nor the youtube church)
Daniel Mitsui's entry Great Clocks of Christendom, part I with the image of the one inside Strasbourg Cathedral, brought to mind the MetaFilter post Audio versions of articles from The New Yorker, The Atlantic and more.
Brian Hayes had an article, 'Clock of Ages', on the history, features and operation of the current clock, in the November/December 1999 issue of The Sciences (this link is to the .pdf of the entire issue).
There is an audio file of the Hayes article (mp3 format file here) on the web site of AssistiveMedia. Assistive Media is a a non-profit organization providing audio access to spoken-word recordings of short-subject literary works for people with visual and text reading barriers.
From the article:The original clock had three mechanical Magi that bowed down before the Virgin and child every hour on the hour.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Clock of the Three Kings was no longer running and no longer at the leading edge of horological technology. To supervise an upgrade, the Strasbourgeois hired Conrad Dasypodius, the professor of mathematics at Strasbourg, as well as the clock maker Isaac Habrecht and the artist Tobias Stimmer. Those three laid out the basic plan of the instrument still seen today, including the three-turreted case and most of the paintings and sculptures. A curiosity surviving from that era is the portrait of Copernicus—a curiosity because the planetary display on the Dasypodius clock was Ptolemaic. The second clock lasted another 200 years or so.
The story of the third clock starts with an anecdote so charming that I can’t bear to look too closely into its authenticity. Early in the 1800s, the story goes, a beadle was giving a tour of the cathedral, and mentioned that the clock had been stopped for twenty years. No one knew how to fix it. A small voice piped up: “I will make it go!” The boy who made the declaration was Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué, and forty years later he made good on his promise.
There was mild conflict over the terms of Schwilgué’s commission. He wanted to build an entirely new clock; the cathedral administration wanted to repair the old one. They compromised: he gutted the works but kept the case, and built his new indicators and automata to fit the old design. The new mechanism began ticking on October 2, 1842.
Schwilgué was clearly thinking longterm when he undertook the project. As I noted earlier, the leap-year mechanism includes parts that engage only once every 400 years—parts that will soon be tested for the first time, and then lie dormant again until 2400. ...
Other parts of Schwilgué’s clock look even further into the future. There is a gear deep in the works of the ecclesiastical computer that turns once every 2,500 years. And the celestial sphere out in front of the clock has a still-slower motion. In addition to the sphere’s daily rotation, it pirouettes slowly on another axis to reflect the precession of the equinoxes of the earth’s orbit through the constellations of the zodiac. In the real solar system, that stately motion is what has lately brought us to the dawning of the age of Aquarius. In the clock, the once-per-siderealday spinning of the globe is geared down at a ratio of 9,451,512 to 1, so that the equinoxes will complete one full precessional cycle after the passage of a bit more than 25,806 years. (The actual period is now thought to be 25,784 years.)
When Hayes mentions the 'ecclesiastical computer', he refers to this:
ecclesiastical computer of the Strasbourg Cathedral clock
[ read the rest of this post ]
Ninth century psalter found in Irish bogBy the middle of the sixteenth century, the Clock of the Three Kings was no longer running and no longer at the leading edge of horological technology. To supervise an upgrade, the Strasbourgeois hired Conrad Dasypodius, the professor of mathematics at Strasbourg, as well as the clock maker Isaac Habrecht and the artist Tobias Stimmer. Those three laid out the basic plan of the instrument still seen today, including the three-turreted case and most of the paintings and sculptures. A curiosity surviving from that era is the portrait of Copernicus—a curiosity because the planetary display on the Dasypodius clock was Ptolemaic. The second clock lasted another 200 years or so.
The story of the third clock starts with an anecdote so charming that I can’t bear to look too closely into its authenticity. Early in the 1800s, the story goes, a beadle was giving a tour of the cathedral, and mentioned that the clock had been stopped for twenty years. No one knew how to fix it. A small voice piped up: “I will make it go!” The boy who made the declaration was Jean-Baptiste Schwilgué, and forty years later he made good on his promise.
There was mild conflict over the terms of Schwilgué’s commission. He wanted to build an entirely new clock; the cathedral administration wanted to repair the old one. They compromised: he gutted the works but kept the case, and built his new indicators and automata to fit the old design. The new mechanism began ticking on October 2, 1842.
Schwilgué was clearly thinking longterm when he undertook the project. As I noted earlier, the leap-year mechanism includes parts that engage only once every 400 years—parts that will soon be tested for the first time, and then lie dormant again until 2400. ...
Other parts of Schwilgué’s clock look even further into the future. There is a gear deep in the works of the ecclesiastical computer that turns once every 2,500 years. And the celestial sphere out in front of the clock has a still-slower motion. In addition to the sphere’s daily rotation, it pirouettes slowly on another axis to reflect the precession of the equinoxes of the earth’s orbit through the constellations of the zodiac. In the real solar system, that stately motion is what has lately brought us to the dawning of the age of Aquarius. In the clock, the once-per-siderealday spinning of the globe is geared down at a ratio of 9,451,512 to 1, so that the equinoxes will complete one full precessional cycle after the passage of a bit more than 25,806 years. (The actual period is now thought to be 25,784 years.)
ecclesiastical computer of the Strasbourg Cathedral clock
