John Walker Half-Quarter Repeater Pocket Watch

Inventory number: PW1809035

Circa 1873, 50mm, 18K gold open-face case. Special light green Willis enamel dial, three subsidiary dials indicating the date, day, and seconds. Half-quarter repeating activated by a slide in the band. Among all types of string, quarter and minute repeaters are most commonly used, others like this half-quarter repeater are rarely found.

Watchmaking Glossary

The half-quarter repeater can sound the time to half a quarter-hour, or 7 1⁄2 minutes. It strikes hours and then quarter hours, like the quarter repeater, then it uses a single tone in order to signal if more than half of the current quarter-hour has passed.

As we showed in the video, it’s 7:20, the mechanism strikes 7 low tones(dong), and then 2 sequence tones ("ding-dong") to represent 1 quarter-hour has passed.