CANADIAN GENERAL ELECTRIC (Toronto)
The American parent company: Henry Warren in the United States invented the self-starting synchronous motor in 1916 (patented 1918). His Warren Clock Company in Ashland, Massachusetts, initially produced battery-driven clocks. It was renamed the Warren Telechron Company in 1926 and began to make synchronous electric clocks. The separate General Electric company was a silent partner from the beginning, but the General Electric name began to appear on dials only around 1931.
GE took controlling interest in 1943, and the clock company was known as Telechron from 1946 to 1951. Production of electric clocks declined by the 1960s because of the introduction of cordless battery clocks.
(from the book ELECTRIFYING TIME: Telechron & G.E. Clocks, 1925-1955, Jim Linz, Schiffer Publishing Ltd, 2001)
The Toronto Factories: My check of old Toronto business directories indicated that Canadian General Electric was in operation from about 1930 to 1959. Its first factory was located at 212-216 King Street West in the early 1930s. Later locations included 221 Dufferin, 830/940/1025 Lansdowne, and 224-228 Wallace. I don’t know in which of these factories the clocks were made. The kitchen clocks had just the letter-number codes on the labels. The advertisements and boxes also included the model name.
Many models of electric alarm and table clocks were also produced in Toronto for the Canadian market. The museum has several examples of these in its collection of Canadian General Electric clocks.
The pictures here show the wall models currently (April 2017) in the museum's Canadian General Electric collection. Plastic was king in the 1950s and most models in the catalogues had several options for the bright colours, including YELLOW and RED. Some models were bicolour. The production dates are Amercian from the above book, but the Canadian dates will be similar.
Even after sixty years, some of these old clocks are still running! The quality of the self-starting electric motors was very high. The red colour seen in the HOLE in the dial below the 12 for some models was a power failure indicator that let you know that the power had been off and the dial time was incorrect.
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