subject: The Contract Between Salomon Coster And John Fromanteel In 1657 [print this page] Master clockmaker Salomon Coster (c 1620-1659) was born in Haarlem in the Netherlands. Many years later (it is said he was trained in Germany) he and his new wife moved to The Hague. It is said he was an active Baptist. He hired an apprentice named Peter Visbagh in 1646 who worked for Coster for six years. Later when Salomon Coster died unexpectedly Visbagh would move back to The Hague and take over the clock business from Coster's widow. Peter Visbagh would be one of the finer clockmakers in The Hague for the next twenty-five years.
About June 1657 Christiaan Huygens and Salomon Coster made a business agreement (assignment of Huygens's intellectual rights) that would allow Salomon Coster ('met privilege') to make and sell pendulum clocks. The new pendulum clock would overtake the European clock industry and was intended to make Christiaan and Salomon Coster rich men.
Nowadays we take for granted the accuracy that we enjoy with a run-of-the-mill mass-produced wall or floor clock. This was not so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Clocks before the invention of the pendulum would lose fifteen minutes each day. The early pendulum clocks produced by Coster would lose only a minute per week. This sixtyfold increase in accuracy was unheard of in a clock that could be mass-produced. A few years later that number was dropped to a few seconds a day and would continue to drop from there.
So three months after this revolutionary news reaches London, a man possibly known by Christiaan Huygens shows up at Salomon Coster's workshop. His name is John Fromanteel, whose father owns two clock producing workshops in London. What the deal was that was struck between Coster and Fromanteel may never be known, but a contact of apprenticeship was signed by Coster and Fromanteel in 1657.
Two views dominate regarding the 1657 contract; one view as affirmed by the British is that Fromanteel was an experienced clockmaker who had large amounts of knowledge about pendulums and finished the development of his version of the pendulum clock when working for Salomon Coster. The other view is that the majority of knowledge about the construction and workings of the pendulum clock Fromanteel gained from working with Salomon Coster.
Two areas bother me about the first view; first, what would motivate a successful businessman to give his secrets to Fromanteel only to see him leave and develop a completive clock in London and close out Salomon Coster from distribution of his clock in London?
Why would Salomon Coster give away the rights to sell the clock in London and then in 1658 Huygens and Coster jointly sue Simon Douw to stop him selling his competing but fundamentally different system?
