Philadelphia Clockmaker Edward Duffield and The American Revolution with Bob Frishman

In 1743, Benjamin Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society to “promote useful knowledge.” The APS is the nation’s oldest learned society. Since 1900, more than 260 members have received the Nobel Prize. One of its early members was clockmaker Edward Duffield (1730–1803), elected in 1768. Duffield grew up next door to the Philadelphia home where Franklin once boarded after leaving his brother’s Boston print shop, and the two families formed a lifelong friendship. In 2024, the APS published the first comprehensive biography of Duffield, written by Massachusetts horologist and scholar Bob Frishman. The book includes an illustrated catalogue of seventy-one signed clocks and instruments and has received three national awards. Frishman presented an illustrated, accessible lecture on Duffield and eighteenth-century clockmaking in North America and England, with special attention to the people the clockmaker knew and the historic events that he witnessed. Duffield was more than a skilled craftsman. Born into wealth, he held civic and Anglican Church leadership roles and moved in the highest circles of Revolutionary Philadelphia. In June 1776, preliminary conversations about the Declaration of Independence took place at his country estate, where Franklin was staying and where John Adams and Thomas Jefferson came to discuss Jefferson’s draft. Through the life of Edward Duffield, this lecture offers a fresh perspective on Revolutionary-era Philadelphia and the world of early American science, craftsmanship, and politics.

About the Speaker

Bob Frishman is the founder of Bell-TIme Clocks of Andover and has repaired and restored 8,000 mechanical clocks, sold 1,800 vintage timepieces, published more than 150 articles on horology – the science of timekeeping, and lectured to more than 175 public audiences in America and England. He is a Silver Star Fellow of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors (NAWCC), a Liveryman of London’s Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, and an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. As Chair of the NAWCC Time Symposium Committee, he created international symposia at the Winterthur Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Henry Ford Museum, The Museum of the American Revolution, the Horological Society of New York, and the Germanisches National Museum in Nuremberg. His personal library of horology-related books numbers 1,100-plus volumes.