The Remarkable ATMOS Clock and it's travels

 

My fathers retirement gift from Polysar Ltd.

This is the short history of the significant gift that was given my father Geaorge W. Vandenbroek after his retirement from 25 years work in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada at the company called POLYMER and later renamed POLYSAR.  He started there shortly after we came to Canada in 1951 and he considered himself very lucky to have been hired as he spoke very little English at the time.  Our family was living at the time in a very poor farmhouse on the rural line in Wyoming, Ontario which has become Confederation Line.  We rented the house, which had no plumbing, no gas and no electricity.  I remember my mother having to walk down to the creek to bring back a bucket of water to boil for cooking.  In our first winter in Canada I was 7 years old and I helped my father saw firewood with a bow saw to heat the home.  He also cut extra to sell and told me he earned 25 cents an hour to do so.  After he got the job at Polymer he could ride with another employee the 15 miles to Sarnia for his work.  Within another few months he had saved enough to buy a 1938 Pontiac car and drove himself.  We moved to the town of Wyoming that fall and after several more years we bought our first house, for $4500.  in Petrolia.

My father worked for 25 years as a stationary engineer at the latex division of Polymer where he was responsible, with several others, for monitoring the instrumentation that controlled the many stages of latex production in the plant.  He proudly showed me through the plant one day when I was about 18 years old and I have a photo of him in front of a busy rack of controls which was his station.  He worked the 3 shifts of that job for 25 years and was presented with the ATMOS clock at his retirement in 1976 at age 65.

The ATMOS is a Swiss made clock from the company Jaeger le Coultre.  It is an historic piece of Swiss engineering that runs continuously without winding or battery power.  The energy that powers it is the day-to-day change of atmospheric pressure, however slight, that moves a bellows, made of metal, which  raises a small chain and in turn winds a spring which runs the clock.  A finely balanced wheel oscillates to govern the time.  It can be tuned so precisely that it maintains time within a second per month.  It has been running without maintenance for the past 46 years with only stops while it was being moved.  Moved it has been, from it's manufacture in Switzerland to Canada in 1976.  From Canada to Holland with dad when he returned to retire there.  Back to Canada in 1994 when he moved back to Canada.  When dad died I inherited the clock and it went with us to Santa Barbara California, then to Lompoc CA and further to Oklahoma in 2008 when I retired.  In 2011 it traveled back to Ontario, to Chatham for 10 years.  Finally it was brought to Tyler Texas by Ian Gare on his visit to Texas in 2022 to be placed on its mantle where it is now keeping great time.

Update on this date, MAY 27, 2026. The clock has now relocated once again, it travelled to Tazewell, Virginia in Dec. 2025 when we moved from Texas. It sits on the Baldwin piano in the living room at 131 Jeffersonville St. it's new home for the present.