Bulova "Double Eagle" Coin Stack Alarm Clock, c. 1980s Americana Collection Desk Piece

The Piece

A short stack of twenty-dollar gold pieces that happens to tell the time. Bulova modeled this desk alarm clock as a pile of Saint-Gaudens double eagles — Liberty striding forward on the tilted top coin, torch raised, dated MCMVII — with the clock face set into the stack below, printed with the coin's reverse: "United States of America — Twenty Dollars," eagle in flight, under raised Roman numerals and diamond-tipped hands. Reeded coin edges ring every layer of the stack.

The back tells its own little story: alongside the Bulova Americana Collection model number sits the retailer's sticker of T.R. Miller Co. of Needham, Massachusetts — a corporate awards house — which means this clock almost certainly began life as an executive gift or retirement presentation. Somebody's twenty-five years of service, told in gold-toned minutes.

History

The coin being celebrated here has a claim to being America's most beautiful. In 1907, Theodore Roosevelt personally recruited sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to redesign the nation's coinage, and the resulting twenty-dollar double eagle — Liberty mid-stride at sunrise, first struck in the Roman-numeral year MCMVII — has been the gold standard of American coin design ever since. Gold coins vanished from circulation in 1933, which only deepened the design's mystique.

Bulova, the great American clock and watch house founded in 1875, leaned into that mystique with its Americana Collection desk pieces of the 1970s and '80s — quartz-movement novelties that put national icons on the executive desk. The coin-stack clock was a natural: wealth, time, and Liberty in one paperweight-sized package, handed out by the corporate gift trade to mark milestones. As Wall Street desk props of the era go, it is the whole aesthetic in three inches.

Product Details

Why It Belongs In Your Home

Every desk deserves one object with a wink, and a stack of gold coins that tells the time is a very good wink. It reads beautifully among leather, brass, and dark wood — study shelf, library table, or the desk of anyone who works in money and keeps a sense of humor about it. And the story lands in one line: Roosevelt's favorite sculptor, America's most beautiful coin, and the corporate gift that turned it into a clock. Time is money; this one commits to the bit.