Hands

All George Washington clocks with a few notable exceptions utilize so-called "Bruguet" style hands which take their name from the the renouned watchmaker Abraham-Louis Breguet. As a teenager, Bruguet left his home in Neuchâtel and headed to Paris for a watchmaking apprenticeship, and he later opened a workshop in the Ile de la Cité in Paris in 1775.

As has been noted, watch hands of Bruguet's period were:

often short, broad and heavily decorated, added to the generally rather ponderous effect and difficulty of reading the dial. From his earliest days as a watchmaker, Breguet set out to streamline not only the internal mechanisms but also the external forms of his watches. As the hands are an essential part of the watch, both functionally and aesthetically, it is not surprising that this is another area in which Abraham-Louis Breguet left his indelible mark. To begin with he used gold English hands, until in about 1783 he invented a type of hand that was uncompromisingly new, made of gold or blued steel, and described variously as resembling a hollow apple or a crescent moon, the principle being that the points were hollowed out in eccentric fashion. Of extreme delicacy and irresistible elegance, the new shape was an immediate success. The term ‘Breguet hands’, like ‘Breguet overcoil’, soon entered the vocabulary of watchmaking.[1]

Much of the same could be said to apply to clock hands of the period. Bruguet style hands, also referred to as "pomme" hands[2] soon entered the vocabulary French clock makers of the period, and were used almost exclusively on George Washington clocks. On Bruguet style hands, the arrow on the hour hand is shorter than the arrow on the minute hand, which can be seen on Winterthur's Dubuc clock directly below:

Bruguet's fabrication records mention the names of makers of these hands: Vaujour was mentioned for forty years from 1787 to 1826; Thévenon, from 1793 to 1822; Jaquet, from 1826; Lalieue from 1830; and Albertine Marat from 1818 and 1823.[3] Although more substantial than watch hands, these makers could have supplied the hands that appear on George Washington clocks, although there appear to be no records proving that.

As previously noted, a handful of Washington clocks don't use the "classic" Bruguet, crescent moon style hands. Since Bruguet hands are so ubiquitous on these clocks, it's natural to question whether clocks without them have had their hands replaced, which may be the case for the minute hands in Examples 2 and 3 below.

The hands in Examples 4 and 5 are outliers in that they are the only known sets of bronze hands on any George Washington clock. When Example 5 came to market in 2013, the auction house dated the clock to 1840[4], which feels correct after looking at the dial/hands combination. This squares with Lara Pascalli's observation that "...these clocks continued to be produced throughout the nineteenth century."[5]