Salomon Coster Met Privilege
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.
To understand the impact this had would be like comparing a first-generation computer to the modern Apple iPod. It was that big of a deal. It would enable astronomers of the day to accurately track the movement of stars and planets to within seconds per day. This also opened the idea of looking deeper into the much needed Naval clocks. Imagine a clock that a few years before would lose fifteen minutes a day, and now they could have access to a clock that only lost a few seconds a day.
Now a new twist arrives at the workshop of Salomon Coster named John Fromanteel. Huygens and his father, Ahasuerus Fromanteel, are said to have met in London and ran in similar social circles. Ahasuerus owned two workshops in London that also produced clocks. We have yet to know all that went on behind the scenes, but a contract was signed between Salomon Coster and John Fromanteel.
With as many accounts as there are scholars of seventeenth century clocks, two views stand out on the Salomon Coster 1657 contract: the British belief that Fromanteel had more than theoretical knowledge of pendulum clocks prior to signing on with Salomon Coster; and the other view (see the Coster-Fromanteel Contract) , that Fromanteel was as stated, a junior apprentice, and learned from Coster how to construct a new generation of clocks that kept time accurately over long time periods. Either way, after this apprenticeship, Fromanteel would modify and improve his changes to the pendulum clock, making it even more accurate.
After doing the research and reading most of the modern-day articles, I have not yet formed a solid opinion. I do find it curious that if I follow the prevailing view I seem to find myself going against normal business conduct.
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?
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