Westclox Factory
Big Ben was patented here
320 5th Street, Peru, IL
Charles Stahlberg patented the lead-alloy gear-plate idea in 1885 and went bankrupt twice before zinc baron F.W. Matthiessen reorganized his United Clock Company as Western Clock Manufacturing in 1888. The Big Ben alarm clock — patented 1908, the first alarm clock ever advertised nationally — followed in 1909. The Saturday Evening Post ran the first ad in 1910. Baby Ben came that same year. At its peak the plant ran three thousand workers across forty-four buildings, with gardens, tennis courts, and a bowling alley on the campus. During the war the company made one-dollar-and-sixty-five-cent 'Waralarm' clocks with no maker name on them — brass was rationed.
R.D. Patton joined Stahlberg's startup in 1886 at age thirteen and was still working at Westclox fifty years later. The luminous dials of the 1920s and 1930s were hand-painted by women using radium paint — the radium-girls connection nobody talks about. Closed 2001. Two teenagers set fire to the complex on New Year's Day, 2012, destroying a quarter of it. The surviving wing is now the Westclox Museum.