Pity poor Michael Sarna and John Shallcross.
On April 1, when clocks get set ahead an hour for daylight-saving time, you will have to adjust, at most, half a dozen timepieces.
But Sarna and Shallcross are responsible for the 450 clocks on display at the new “Time” exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, as well as 1,100 others that are in storage at the museum. And while only some of those clocks are currently up and running, they must be synchronized more or less precisely.
What’s more, these are not your basic Westclox, Timex or Swatch devices, whose stems merely need to be pulled out and given a twist or two.
They include clocks such as Christian Gebhard’s.
This massive timepiece, which is a focal point of the exhibit, is 10 feet high and weighs 3 tons. Completed by Gebhard in 1895 in Germany, the clock features an hourly extravaganza of choreographed figurines that turns timekeeping into a Gilbert & Sullivan production.
Every quarter-hour, a miniature toy bell-ringer in the middle of the clock revolves and hits a chime with a single blow. At the half-hour, he hits it twice. Meanwhile, the end, or “death,” of the hour is marked by the appearance of the Grim Reaper and an angel, who parade on a walkway and, during their brief march, turn over an hourglass.
But it is at noon when the real action takes place, as Mayor Richard Daley found out recently at the official dedication ceremonies of the MSI exhibit. Daley and a small army of VIPs were planted in front of the Gebhard clock at the stroke of midday, when, as it does every 24 hours, the figure of Jesus Christ materialized to lead a procession of the 12 Apostles down another of the great clock’s walkways. Then, at the sight of St. Peter, a cock watching the parade raised its head and crowed three times.
This all must have been very helpful for Daley, who, aides say, does not even wear a wristwatch.
Sarna, curator of the exhibit, and Shallcross, the collection’s restorer and its caretaker for nearly 14 years in Rockford, where it was formerly housed, will surely have their hands full when the clocks change April 1. “This is a very time-consuming project,” says Sarna, with a pun that may or may not have been intended.
Indeed. Winding and synchronizing all the working clocks can keep one busy. The timepieces in the exhibit range from a tiny Swiss ring watch from the 19th Century to an Atomic Hydrogen Master Clock built in 1961 by U.S. scientists to help prove Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. (The oldest clock on display, incidentally — though it needs no winding, of course — is a 3,000-year-old Chinese sundial.)
There is also the Pneumatic Master Clock, which is currently the most reliable. “Right now, it’s the clock keeping the most accurate time,” says Mark Hayward, senior exhibit director at the MSI. “It’s been ticking along nicely ever since we opened the exhibit.”
But for basic, everyday accuracy, Shallcross recommends any of the traditional, old grandfather clocks on display. “They might be off by a few seconds per week, but they’re pretty accurate for the most part,” Shallcross said.
In the last few months everyone at the MSI has learned just how tough a customer time can be — if for no other reason than they ran out of it organizing the exhibition, which is considered the most comprehensive collection in the world of timepieces from all cultures.
Originally the show was set to be unveiled two months ago on New Year’s Eve, when the priceless collection was supposed to usher in what many people consider the real millennium. A gala party was planned at which hundreds of clocks were to strike midnight at the evening’s climax. But the opening had to be delayed when installation materials failed to arrive as planned.
“I know everyone was disappointed when I told them we couldn’t get it done by then, but this exhibit is so complex and so precise, and it is so important to get everything right, that I felt we really couldn’t rush things,” Sarna says. “This is like nothing we’ve ever worked on before.”
The exhibit, though still not finished, eventually opened to the public on Jan. 25. Museum officials have continued fine tuning the clocks while working around visitors. It’s not an easy task.
“We’re learning they’re like pets,” Hayward says of the timepieces, “and they have their own idiosyncrasies. We had this false expectation that we’d be able to set them up, wind them and watch ’em go. Instead, we’re working our way through them one-at-a-time. We had been living with them as static objects for a year. Now we’re just getting used to them as working, functioning things.”
The museum is calling the new display “a living exhibit” and will rotate the clocks that are now in storage into the displays. They also have plans to exhibit some of the clocks at the Adler Planetarium, starting in April.
The stakes are unusually high for the MSI project. The City of Chicago, with Daley’s blessing, committed $25 million to buy the magnificent collection, which was formerly owned by Seth Atwood and housed in Rockford. That’s nearly three times what the Field Museum of Natural History laid out for Sue, its prized T-rex dinosaur skeleton.
The collection was on display for 28 years in Rockford before Chicago purchased it in November 1999. Its home was in the Clocktower Inn, just off Interstate Highway 90 on Rockford’s eastern edge.
The timepieces attracted about 25,000 visitors annually and, interestingly, about half were from outside the U.S. Chicago officials expect to draw more visitors to the exhibit in one year than the total number for all the years it was in Rockford.
Mike Lash, director of public art for Chicago and City Hall’s point person for the clock project, indicated the timepieces eventually could be headed to a permanent home elsewhere, perhaps in a stand-alone museum at another, undetermined site in the city.
The collection is committed to the MSI “for the next 3-5 years,” and its popularity will be monitored closely. Though there is no extra admission charge to see the show, Lash says, “We’re estimating it will generate between $9-12 million in extra revenue the first five years.
“We don’t think much about time itself, but I think this exhibit is going to raise new questions in people’s minds,” Lash says. “Everyone wears a wristwatch and everything relating to time is so interwoven in our lives that we take it for granted.”
Shallcross, an Englishman who nearly 15 years ago accepted an offer from Atwood to relocate to Rockford and take care of the timepieces, has worked with MSI officials since the city purchased the clocks. Now that the exhibit is opened, he makes periodic trips to Chicago to assist with getting, and keeping, them in running order.
“Clocks made in the early 1700s are still capable of running and keeping pretty good time,” he says. “But we have to be careful of what we expect. We get very excited if an automobile that’s 100 years old can run. Some of these clocks are much older, and more precise, than that.”
Shallcross says those clocks made after development of the pendulum around 1675 have the best chance for giving the correct time. “Before that, you couldn’t get accuracy for more than a few hours a day,” he says.
Right now, fewer than 50 of the 450 clocks on display are running and can give visitors the time. Many of the pieces will never run for a variety of reasons, Hayward notes, and the goal is to get as many as possible in working shape.
Some of those timepieces in the collection that work, such as the Tower Clock, a fixture of the Rockford display and the timepiece that greets visitors at the exhibit’s entry point, have to be wound at least once a day. Others can go more than a week without winding — and it’s enough to make Sarna feel like his life is being paced by the ticking clock on CBS’ “60 Minutes.”
His schedule gets particularly lively each noon. Nearly every day at that hour, Sarna (or a docent filling in for him) stands in front of the Gebhard clock and gives a short lecture on the exhibit, pointing out features of the huge German timepiece and answering visitors’ questions.
In addition to being one of the most stylish items in the 5,800-square-foot exhibit, the Gebhard, which took the German clockmaker 30 years to complete, has enough detail to keep two curators hopping. Twenty-five boxes were needed to ship its 15,000 parts.
“There’s going to be a lot of bonging and dinging throughout the day, but I think that’s one of the things that will make this exhibit almost magical for visitors,” Sarna says.
Lash grew up in Rockford, not too far from the museum’s old location, and was a fan of the collection before becoming Chicago’s director of public art.
“It’s cool to be able to hold something that Napoleon actually held,” he says, referring to a timepiece on display that was commissioned by the French emperor, “but this also is about the theory of time and how it’s freed us up and enslaved us at the same time.”
Nothing’s finalized, but the MSI is looking at some interactive, special events on days when time is more prominent in our lives, such as when we adjust clocks for daylight saving time; Feb. 29 in a leap year; or the longest and shortest days of the calendar.
Then, of course, there’s New Year’s Eve. It would be fun just to return to observe the Gebhard clock’s activity at midnight on that date.
In addition to Jesus and the 12 Apostles, roosters, angels and the Grim Reaper all doing their thing in the hour leading up to the witching hour, once a year at midnight on Dec. 31 this clock also features a miniature statue of Gabriel making an appearance to blow a trumpet.
EXHIBITION IS WELL WORTH YOUR TIME AND EFFORT
Time may not stand still, but the Museum of Science and Industry has managed to capture it in a way that’s likely to make visitors spend more of it than they planned viewing the museum’s latest exhibit.
There are 450 timepieces to inspect in the show “Time,” and some of them are certain to capture the visitor’s eye. Many of the clocks have a rich, ornate detail that would make any antiques lover drool.
Take the Elephant Automaton Clock, which dates to 17th Century Germanyand is believed to be one of the earliest timepieces to work by a pendulum. The pendulum, in this case, takes the form of the elephant’s tail, which as it swings back and forth, makes the animal’s eyes shift. Then there’s a Bohemian flintlock alarm clock from the 18th Century that automatically ignites a candle at an appointed hour; and a lavishly polished, 8-foot-high 18th-Century Japanese yaguradokei standing clock, which was a gift from a shogun to a relative.
But there’s more reason to linger in this exhibit, especially if visitors are intrigued by the mechanics that make a clock work.
In this case, look no further than the display of escapements, a case of 32 ticking, moving springs, wheels and pendulums that show how energy and movement is generated in the time-keeping process. Or, there’s the large, ancient Lord Wallingford clock — nicknamed “Big Wally” by the MSI staff — hanging from the ceiling. This is an ancient, complex contraption of exposed levers, gears and wheels from England that, in addition to giving the time, once reported eclipses of the moon, tides at London Bridge, and acted as a “wheel of fortune” that purportedly displayed the rise and fall of the local monarchy’s fortunes.
It is almost impossible to view this exhibit without picking out favorites (mine was a hand-held fan from the Orient with a tiny clock built into the base), but this show is more than timepieces on display.
Rather than make it a simple timeline tour of clocks, architect Douglas Garofalo set out to divide the show into four distinct sections — Capturing Time, Defining Time, Displaying Time and Questioning Time — to make learning about time as easy as taking in the beauty of some of the clocks, watches and other devices in the show.
In the Capturing Time section, we note how people first observed nature’s cycles by charting the sun’s shadows, moon’s faces and the passage of seasons through the use of sundials. In Defining Time, visitors see how people struggled to give order to these observations through calendars and clocks. The Displaying Time section shows how such efforts eventually evolved into the fashionable, jewel-bedecked clocks commissioned by European and Oriental royalty. And finally, Questioning Time asks cosmic questions, such as: Is time really absolute?
From the moment you enter this exhibit, and a Roman sundial from Pompeii, circa 50 A.D., explains how time was first measured by observing nature, the exhibition progresses along a system of eye-appealing, dramatically lit circular walls that make a visit seem like an effortless float through, well, time.
There are approximately 1,500 timepieces overall in the priceless collection, which for 28 years, until its purchase by the City of Chicago, was on display in Rockford. Only 450 are on view at any given time, but curators plan to rotate many pieces between storage and the display cases. This is said to be the largest, most important collection of clocks to be found in the U.S.
Chicago has always had a special relationship with time.
In 1883, government administrators and railroad executives gathered here to finalize the creation of U.S. time zones as we know them today. The Elgin Watch Co., one of several clock manufacturers located in the area, made more than 50 million watches in 100 years and helped make Chicago an acknowledged leader in timepiece production.
Whereas “Time” may be reason enough to make a trip to the MSI, it is the first of three major, new displays planned by the South Side museum in 2001. An Internet exhibit will open in a few months, to be followed in the fall by a show about genetic engineering.
But it is time that we usually take for granted, except when pressed to find more of it, and this MSI exhibit is a wonderful way to pause for a better appreciation.
— Mike Conklin
