to set his hand to the
work, but that the new discovery itself was scoffed at by many
as altogether a nightmarish delirium of an unbridled
imagination.

The first months of the project must have seemed like an inspired dream
to the two men, and then must have followed a period of hopeless
depression. Bertolla undoubtedly felt many times that the clock was an
aspiration far beyond their combined abilities and means, but the priest
would not be thwarted in his ambition and refused to abandon the
project. He felt that it was a work that they were destined to produce.
Many times, he wrote, he chided and begged and shamed his erstwhile
partner into resuming the project where it had been last abandoned.
Little by little, the first clock began to take form. As each new
difficulty was encountered, the two men would go back over the notes and
sketches to trace the problem to its source. Often a new part of the
mechanism would nullify another which had thus far operated
successfully, and a complete rearrangement would be required.

[Illustration: Figure 7.--TITLE PAGE of Father Borghesi's first book.
The translation in its entirety is: "The Most Recent, Perpetual,
Astronomical Calendar Clock: Theoretical--Practical: by means of which
besides the hours, the minutes and seconds; the current year, the month;
the day of the month and the day of the week; the dominical letter,
epact, and thence, the day of all the feastdays, both fixed and movable;
the solar cycle; the golden number; the Roman indiction; the dominant
planet of any year and its sign; the phases of the moon and its mean
age: and all the motions of the sun and the moon as to longitude,
latitude, eccentricity, etc., are immediately seen, so accurately that
[not only] the true new full moons and the true quadrature, etc., of the
sun and moon appear, but also, all solar and lunar eclipses--both
visible and invisible; as in heaven, so on the clock, they are
conspicuously celebrated in their true times, and those of the past and
those of the future, with their circumstances of time and duration,
magnitude, etc., can be quickly determined. All this was devised and
brought to light by the author, Francesco Borghesi of Anauni, a secular
priest of Trent, A.A.L.L. & Doctor of Philosophy. (Trent: From the
printshop of Giovanni Battista Monauni, With Permission of Superiors.)"
(_Title page reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca della Citta di
Trento._)]

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