The Stanford Clock Tower will be closed down starting on July 16 as it undergoes repairs to its internal components. Located between the Barnum Center and the Graduate School of Education, the Clock Tower will not ring for the next six weeks.
It will remain silent this summer as pieces are taken out to be cleaned or refurbished by San Francisco clock expert Dorian Clair. Work will be done on the Clock Tower structure as well.
“Members of the campus community accustomed to hearing the quarterly chimes will likely take notice,” said Zone C administrator Raina Michel to Stanford News. “The clock is beloved by the Stanford community and our visitors alike.”
The tower was originally a gift from donor William Rice Kimball ’41, former President of the Stanford Board of Trustees from 1974 to 1985, and its construction was completed in 1983. It holds the same clock mechanisms and chime bells that hung in the original 80-foot tall steeple of Memorial Church before the 1906 earthquake toppled the steeple.
However, the clock was not always as accurate as it is today. In a 2001 interview with Stanford News, clockmaker and engineering graduate student Rob Bernier Ph.D. ’01 said, “The clock frequently showed the wrong time or was stopped altogether. It hurt me that such a beautiful clock movement wasn’t working.”
Bernier took it upon himself to restore the clock. Beginning in 1994, he presented a new, temperature-compensated pendulum, partnered with professor of mechanical engineering David Beach M.S. ’72 to work on repairs, and designed new parts to improve the overall quality of the Clock Tower. Things only continued to improve with the money donated by Kimball. Though he left the 100-year-old clockwork in June of 2001 after finishing his doctoral thesis, Bernier’s legacy remains with the Clock Tower.
Bernier was not the sole contributor to the Clock Tower. An excerpt from The Stanford Historical Society’s A Chronology of Stanford University and its Founders states, “Placed in storage after the steeple fell in the 1906 earthquake, the bells and 1901 Seth Thomas clock were installed in a wooden tower behind the church in 1915, then went into storage again when the tower was removed in 1967. Hundreds of volunteer hours went into refurbishing the hand-wound clockworks. Westminster chimes play each quarter hour from 8 a.m. to 7:45 p.m.”
The chimes will be missed this summer during the repair. Bernier puts it best, “I love the clock and I’m going to miss it. It’s a mechanical thing in a computerized world.”
Contact Emily Sun at sunemily.y ‘at’ gmail.com.