Tuesday, June 14, 2016: Osnabrueck

 

6/14/16

Very old pocket watch

6/14/16

Best guess so far it is from about 1773, made in Paris.

 

This was an even less eventful day for us in Osnabrueck than yesterday. Mostly, we stayed home because I needed to get myself ready for my conference in Amsterdam that starts tomorrow! So I was working on my paper and on creating a handout, and we made sure we had all of our ducks for travel back in a row. We didn’t even go downtown, although we did go for a walk in the afternoon and had coffee/tea at the nearby bakery.  We also had a lovely lunch and dinner with my mom–she made us German asparagus with new potatoes and prosciutto, one of my very favorites.

The highlight of the day for Mark was that he saw a pocket watch on a shelf at my mom’s that he could tell was very old, with a handmade silver casing. Imke didn’t know anything about its history (it had been Hermann’s, who collected all sorts of things), but Mark knew how to open it and photographed the clockwork and the craftsmen’s signatures.  So now we’re having fun researching the origins and the age of the watch–we think it’s from the late 18th century!