Records of the James Arthur Collection of Clocks and Watches

Dr. Arthur Lionel Rawlings is listed as the first curator of the Museum, a position he held from 1956 until his death in 1959. (The Arthur Collection had had specific curators before 1956.) Before his appointment as curator, Rawlings served as the head of special products at the Bulova Research and Development Labs in Woodside, Queens. A native of England, Rawlings attended university in Birmingham and London and held many patents on gyro-compasses, gyroscopic stabilization, and fire-control devices. He wrote several books, including the then-standard works The Theory of the Gyro Compass and Science of Clocks and Watches. Previous employers included Sperry Gyroscope, Ltd., the Scientific Research Branch of the British Admiralty, and the U.S. Time Corporation. He also served as president of the Horological Society of New York and was a member of the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors.

Dr. Rawlings also gave one of the Arthur-funded lectures on May 15, 1953, on the following topic: "From Hours to Microseconds: Three Centuries of Timekeeping Progress, 1650-1950."

An obituary for Dr. Rawlings from the Long Island Star-Journal from November 18, 1959, indicates that he passed away after suffering a heart attack while driving on the Van Wyck Expressway on November 17. He was 78.

Per an October 31, 1956, NYU press release, the Watch and Clock Museum was established in that year from the materials in three collections of timepieces then owned by the University. Over half the materials came from the James Arthur Collection of Clocks and Watches, which had been administered by the University since the 1930s.

The Museum was housed in the Gould Memorial Library at NYU's University Heights campus. With over 3,000 timepieces, the Museum was touted as the largest horological collection in the Western Hempisphere at the time of its establishment.

The Arthur Collection included books and research materials, as well as an endowment for the upkeep of the collection and a periodic lecture series on the topic of "time and its mysteries." The money did not prove sufficient for the upkeep and administration of such a varied and difficult collection (some of the timepieces dated from the 16th century). Without the proper resources to reassemble the timepieces and without a sufficient display method, when the University Heights campus closed in 1964 and NYU relocated to Greenwich Village the artifacts were placed on permanent loan to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The books from the Arthur Collection were transferred to the University's rare books collection, and the records and photographs of the collection remained with the University Archives.

In 1982 New York University decided to dispose of the Arthur Collection, dividing the items between The Smithsonian Institution, the Time Museum at Rockford, and the NAWCC Museum at Columbia, Pennsylvania but has retained the records of the collection.

In 1985 the Smithsonian transferred the timepieces to the National Watch and Clock Museum in Columbia, Pennsylvania. In 2006, six of the timepiecse from the collection were sold at auction. More information may be found at the museum's website: http://www.nawcc.org/collections.

James Arthur was born February 26, 1842, in Crosscandley, Ireland. As a boy he studied mechanics and developed an interest in horology. In 1871 he emigrated to New York where in 1885 he founded Arthur and Co., manufacturers of mechanical models for inventors and devices such as differential gears for automobiles.

Arthur's spare time was spent collecting and designing and making clocks and watches. In 1925, at the suggestion of his son-in-law, Irving H. Berg, Chaplain of New York University (1919-1936), and later Dean of University College (1936-1941), Arthur presented his collection of 300 clocks, more than 1500 watches and books to New York University. Accompanying the gift was an endowment of $110,000 to support a series of lectures on "time and its mysteries", to keep the collection in a state of repair and to provide for new acquisitions. Arthur stipulated that none of the income was to be used to pay curators.

James Arthur died in Winsted, Connecticut on April 27, 1930.

For more detailed biographical information see The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, Volume XXXI, page 232, published by James T. White & Company, New York, 1944.