Clock towers are way older than the industrial revolution and also occurred in quite a few different societies, so probably not as a general rule. There are a couple in England and France (Salisbury and Beauvais cathedrals) that are 700 years old, and if you include non-mechanical-clock timekeeping devices like sundials and water clocks then you can go back even further. I could imagine that it's quite possible that there was at least one instance where this was caught and people arranged for some kind of separate public clock, though