The Carroll’s Clock Heist: The Story Behind Clockwork Orange

Some tea blends begin with a remarkable harvest. Others begin with an old family recipe or a memorable journey.

Clockwork Orange began with a theft.

At B. Fuller's, we've long believed that Tea can do more than fill a cup. It has a way of bringing people together - around a table, around a conversation, and occasionally around a shared purpose. When one of Seattle's historic street clocks was stripped of its century-old mechanical heart in a Christmas-weekend museum theft, our founders wondered whether a thoughtfully built Tea might help the community give something back.

The result was Clockwork Orange, a bright, double-citrus loose-leaf Earl Grey built on a smooth black tea base and layered with bergamot oil, ribbons of dried orange peel, and a touch of natural orange essence, one of five interpretations we carry of that same foundation. It was created for a community fundraiser to help restore one of Seattle's more remarkable pieces of public history. The restoration itself finished years ago, but the blend has stayed in our apothecary collection because the story is still worth telling.

Seattle's City of Clocks

To understand the blend, it helps to understand just how many clocks like this Seattle once had.

If you stand today at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Pike Street, you'll still find one: the Ben Bridge Jewelers street clock, quietly keeping time above the sidewalk exactly as it has for decades. It's a genuine, working piece of that era, and worth a visit if you're ever downtown, a real, tangible reminder of what this city's streets used to sound like.

A century ago, public clocks like these weren't decoration. Long before personal wristwatches were common, people organized their day around them, and Seattle's clocks became something of a civic signature thanks largely to Joseph Mayer, a German immigrant, master watchmaker, and gifted entrepreneur who arrived in a wild frontier Seattle in 1884 at just sixteen years old. Mayer built more than a hundred street clocks for customers across multiple states, and downtown jewelers embraced them as the ultimate sidewalk billboard. By 1930, a commuter standing at Fourth and Pike could look a single block in any direction and count sixteen different clocks ticking away. Seattle was proudly known as the City of Clocks.

Ben Bridge's clock, still standing on one corner of that same intersection, is one survivor of that era. Carroll's clock, the one this story is actually about, once stood on another corner nearby, commissioned in 1913 by jeweler Thomas J. Carroll and built by Mayer himself.

Time, Community, and Tea

There's an interesting parallel between a public clock and a pot of Tea. Both quietly gather people. One measures the passing of time; the other encourages us to spend it together.

By 2008, Carroll's clock had been donated to the Museum of History & Industry, then still located in Montlake, its jewelry-store days behind it. Then, over the Christmas weekend in 2009, thieves broke into its housing and stole the clock's original 1913 mechanism entirely, brass workings and all, leaving the casing gutted. The loss was more than mechanical. It represented the sudden emptying-out of a century of shared street-level history. Like many local businesses, we wanted to help. Rather than simply writing a check, our founders did what Tea merchants have always done best, create something worth gathering around.

Turning Loss Into Redemption

For the fundraising event, our founders built a bright, double-citrus Earl Grey that felt as optimistic as the community's recovery effort itself, a smooth black tea base layered with bergamot oil, dried orange peel, and a touch of natural orange essence, velvety in the cup and full of a lingering sweetness that invited people to stay a while over a shared pot.

Its name, Clockwork Orange, is a small, playful nod to Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, borrowed for the mechanical clockwork hidden inside Seattle's historic street clocks rather than anything darker from the book itself.

The community responded generously. MOHAI worked with horologists and clock restorers, who painstakingly rebuilt the stolen mechanisms from scratch since the originals were never recovered, repairing the scarred housing in the process. In August 2012, the fully restored four-ton clock made the move to MOHAI's new home at Lake Union Park alongside the rest of the museum, where it stands today on the museum's terrace near the historic ships dock, a beautifully preserved piece of public art. It no longer runs as a working timepiece, kept instead as a static display, but its face and housing look exactly as they once did on a Seattle sidewalk.

A Blend That Still Keeps Time

The fundraising campaign accomplished its purpose long ago, and buying Clockwork Orange today doesn't support the restoration project, that need has long since been met. The blend stays a permanent part of our collection because the story deserves remembering.

Every cup recalls the craftsmanship of Seattle's early clockmakers, and the simpler idea underneath it: communities get built around the things people care enough to gather over. Sometimes that's a street clock. Sometimes it's a proper pot of Tea.

Explore Clockwork Orange, and the rest of our Earl Grey collection, in our shop.