Osgood Finnegan wasn't Osgood Finnegan by birth. He earned his name. The boy was an orphan and was reared as the ward of an orphanage in a little town called Pugwash, and we know nothing at all about his parents.
Young Finnegan-to-be was apprenticed to a clockmaker, one Carlos Finnegan, on the strength of his fine fingers and his nimble mind. His apprenticeship went so well that Carlos, a man with no family of his own, at last adopted young Osgood and repainted the signs on his workshop to read Finnegan and Son.
Together the two of them expanded Carlos' shop. They built its reputation with a steady stream of beautiful, accurate, and durable timepieces: and they never made anything else. Despite the fact that craftsmen across the world were developing new mechanisms and unheard-of devices, the two Finnegans were content to perfect the one thing they were so well known for. And so things went, and might have gone on, even after Carlos Finnegan died and left his workshop in the care of his adopted son.
They had done so well that there was really too much work for a lone clockmaker. Osgood delayed taking on his own apprentice, though, and found himself trying to stay ahead of his commissions, his orders for brass, wood, and nickel, and even his own deliveries.
It was during one of those deliveries that Osgood's life was to change foreve
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