Museum of watchmakers in the library Guildhall (the former town hall City) - this is actually a collection of watches made over the past four centuries, and the world's largest library devoted to horology.

Mechanical clocks were invented in Western Europe in the Middle Ages and first installed on the church tower. In 1675 a Dutch engineer and physicist Christiaan Huygens patented a pocket watch. The first watches were only women. England kept the leadership in watchmaking until the beginning of XX century - it is here that were made important inventions, dramatically improve the accuracy of measurement of time. The golden age of the industry in the UK fell for decades immediately after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Most of the exhibits of the museum, which occupies only one room, created between 1600 and 1850: about 600 European (including English) and 15 hours of marine chronometers. The history of these extremely precise instruments dramatic and exciting.

After the great geographical discoveries XV-XVI centuries, the era of long voyages - Europe conquered new lands, Europe traded. The competition maritime powers had a chance to win a country that has learned to accurately determine the position of their ships in the ocean. In 1714 the British parliament established a huge premium for the time (20 thousand pounds, about $ 5 million of today's money) to the one who finds a way to accurately determine the longitude. I decided to issue a carpenter, a self-taught inventor John Harrison - he created not afraid of pitching device working even with higher precision than demanded parliament. One of Harrison's chronometers, H5, put on display in the museum - the pearl of the local congregation.

The museum's collection began to take shape in 1814, for the public it was opened sixty years later. Here are the amazing rarities such as decimal hours in 1862 (days are divided into ten o'clock hour hundred minutes, arrows rotate in the opposite direction). The stands exposed to the set decorated with extraordinary grace desktops, PDAs, wristwatches great masters.

The museum belongs to the Worshipful Company of watchmakers - the oldest professional guilds, approved in 1631 by King Charles I. The library of the museum traces its ancestry back to the library of ancient manuscripts, founded the company in 1813. For two centuries here we added all imaginable prints of watchmaking, but the core of the collection are such rarities as handwritten entries inventor John Harrison's chronometer.