No. 552 CUM 10-inch Comtoise month clock with one-piece embossed decorative plate, anchor escapement - small anchor spanning 6 1/2 teeth, half and full hour strike on bell with repetition of the hour strike, enamel dial with floral decoration around the place name, signed: Villenaissage à St. Jean d'Angely, marked: DEPOSE sans Garantie du Gouvernem. Brevete, c. 1848, dial diameter: 220, cage: 276 x 245 x 146 HxWxD, movement: 421 x 248 x 160 HxWxD, pendulum length: approx. 1280 ( all dimensions in mm ) This ornamental plate with the motif *Carpenter Joseph with Mary and son Jesus* is the only attempt I know of to adapt the ornamental plate at the lower edge to the practice of cutting off by cutting in the area of the grooves without having to cut through embossed ornamental plate parts. This was a logical and practical solution to the problem, but it did not catch on. Each decorative plate, whether on a 9-inch, 10-inch or 11-inch clock, continued to be cut individually to fit the movement cage until the end of production at the beginning of the 20th century. The embossed decorative plates were all the same size, as there was only one embossing tool, so although they were made by hand, they met the requirements of industrial mass production. However, as the movement cages and other clock parts were not identical in size, they always had to be cut individually. If the individual parts of the clocks had been manufactured industrially, they would have been interchangeable. At all times of Comtoise clock production, the parts were proto-industrially manufactured, identical parts looked the same but were not interchangeable.
