Ahasuerus Fromanteel

Ahasuerus Fromanteel (circa 25 February 1607 – circa 31 January 1693) was a clockmaker, the first maker of pendulum clocks in Britain.

Life and work Fromanteel was baptised in Norwich on 25 February 1607. He was the first of five children born to Leah and Mordecai Fromanteel, a wood turner. The Fromanteels were a highly respected Flanders family of the sixteenth century. Following Spanish conquest, members of the family fled across the sea to East Anglia, establishing themselves in Colchester, Norwich, and London.

Ahasuerus Fromanteel was apprenticed for seven years to a blacksmith, before settling in London in 1629. He began as a crafter of steeple clocks in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, becoming a member of Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths in 1631. He made lantern clocks with balance wheel escapement, and spring-driven table clocks, and joined the Clockmakers' Guild in 1632. In 1658 Fromanteel were taken before the guild for hiring more apprentices than the rules stipulated, which suggests that the firm was thriving. He developed microscopes and lenses, building on the work of Cornelis Drebbel and Benjamin Worsley in Amsterdam. Although claimed by Samuel L. Macey to have caused "industrial espionage on a grand scale" it has been argued by Theodore M. Porter, that Macey fails to conform with the normal writings associated with history. That Macey can be accused of rambling and quite often losing the point of an argument he is trying to make. Therefore, there is not much academic scholarship to be associated with Macey's argument that Fromanteel was guilty of any form of espionage.

Following a trip to the Netherlands John and Ahasuerus implemented the new, more accurate pendulum technology. Fromanteel became the first maker of pendulum clocks in England, although this distinction has also been claimed by horologists Richard Harris and Robert Hooke. Precise measurement of time was critical for disciplines including maritime navigation and astronomy. Fromanteel used the design for regulating steeple and domestic clocks and sold them from the family house in Southwark and at a shop in Lothbury, which had been a famous retailer of clocks for more than a hundred years. The Fromanteel family sold also weight-driven clocks, watches that needed only a single annual winding and a variety of domestic and industrial engines, selling to the city of Norwich one of his patent fire engines. As Mark Denny states in Five Machines That Changed the World, Fromanteel's patent "ushered in the age of English longcase clocks, which dominated horology for a century".

Later years Fromanteel relocated back in the Netherlands in 1667–76. His son John was left in London to look after the business with Thomas Loomes, a former apprentice, married to Fromanteel's daughter Mary. Following the death of his wife Maria, Ahasuerus Fromanteel wed the widow Sarah Winnock (c. 1660). They lived in Whitechapel, where other of the Fromanteel family were established as silk weavers. Fromanteel died in 1693, and was interred at St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel, on 31 January 1693.