What is the weight of time?
It varies from pendulum to pendulum for novel clockmaker Rick Stanley, 69, who’s been tinkering with mechanical, time-telling wonders for almost 30 years. But in the sense of meaningfulness, he added, it revolves around watching others’ faces light up.
Mr. Stanley’s childlike tinkering was inspired when he was a teenager walking through Frank Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium in San Francisco’s Embarcadero. Here, he crossed paths with a shoe-testing machine with several sample shoes on the spokes of a wheel that ran on a treadmill.
“They probably got it out of an old shoe-making factory … I thought that looked intriguing,” Mr. Stanley told The Epoch Times over the phone. “They’re checking the quality of shoes, ‘How many miles can a shoe go before it starts wearing out?’”
Mr. Stanley’s fascination with novel machines led to his obtaining a mechanical engineering degree from the University of California, before moving out to Pennsylvania to set up a tinkerer’s paradise on a 50-acre (20-hectare) plot. There, the concept of the shoe-testing machine he once saw in the Exploratorium took on a whole new dimension—that is, the fourth dimension.
“Trying to get items that are unusual to do precision time is something that was an interest to me,” said Mr. Stanley, who has built dozens of odd clock contraptions over the decades—some spanning dozens of feet long. “What I tried to do with the various different clocks was use items that people could relate to—I have balls, golf balls, bottles, bicycles. I wanted things where people could look at it and say, ‘Huh, that’s something that I would never thought you could use for timekeeping.’”
A novelty hand attached to the wheel punches a button at one end and changes the time. The Walking Clock is accurate down to about three seconds per minute but is aided with a digital timer for extra precision. Time on this clock is told by a 3-foot (91-centimeter) dial with novelty hands—a recurring feature in Mr. Stanley’s work—pointing to the minute and hour.
Mr. Stanley’s love of working with his hands and using his imagination in timekeeping led to his starting a clock-making business over two decades ago. For this, he got an education in the inner workings of traditional clocks and completely dissected a grandfather clock, literally and figuratively. The latter deconstruction broke down time-telling into its five essential elements: energy, gearing, escapement, control, and indication. All exist in some form or other in Mr. Stanley’s works of ingenuity.
Energy might take the form of a spring-powered contraption or quartz crystal. Or it could be the most simplistic physical force of all: gravity. Thus, the weight of a rock or pendulum could impel the telling of time.
But that energy has to be transferred. Traditionally, gearing achieved this by converting said energy, causing the second hand to tick, while subsequent gears slow down the motion to generate minutes and hours.
Escapement is the mechanism by which this energy is “grabbed,” transferred to the gears, and let go again—thus cycling back to repeat the action. The swinging pendulum mechanism of a grandfather clock illustrates this at its fulcrum where it connects to the gears.
As for control, this is where the fine-tuning of time comes into play. The adjustable length of a pendulum, for example, uses physics (leverage) to either speed up or slow down the rate at which it swings—typically pendulums are tuned to swing once per second. Or in the case of Mr. Stanley’s walking clock, the distance the wheel has to travel becomes the control.
Lastly, indication tells the time. There are dials, hands, digital displays, and myriad other pointers, markers, and indicators devised for this purpose.
The limits of clockmaking, Mr. Stanley learned, are bound only by one’s imagination.
The challenge of turning everyday objects into clocks proved irresistible to him. One day he saw a bottle and thought, “If I put a bunch of them together, can I make them into gears? Are they going to break?” The results, he added, made others’ “eyes light up” and started them thinking about everything “in a little bit different light.” That’s what keeps him ticking.
Throughout Mr. Stanley’s display and work areas—his barn showroom, woodworking shop, and metalworking shop, which were either rundown outbuildings refurbished or new structures—are found test pieces, prototypes, and finished works. “I live with it for a few years,” he said, adding that they might come together in a new clock down the road.
“Time Traveler” is one of his newest clocks. Featuring a motley of interestingly-mottled luggage on a cart, the whole is controlled by hydraulics. Spot-on every hour, one of those bags clunkily opens with a mess of time and travel items.
Adding to the Dr. Seuss feel, animatronics in the workshop perform tasks—menial to the point of being laughable—to assist Mr. Stanley’s work; they seem more geared toward his having fun than anything else. An arm with a feather duster regularly drops from the ceiling to dust off one foot of the barn. There’s the novelty hand that pushes a button (at the push of a button) to play Mr. Stanley’s music. There is a feeder that lowers and raises the cat’s bowl automatically on sensing its chip.
Mr. Stanley’s clocks showcase the technology. That’s where the learning and fun is. Where clockmakers once displayed the beauty and craftsmanship of their work by showing the gears, today’s technology is comparatively austere. “Nobody can learn anything,” he said. “Either put it in a glass case or put it in no case. Sometimes it needs to be covered, [otherwise] people will put their fingers in it.”
His life’s work surrounds time. And it “happened gradually,” said the Pennsylvanian, who has lived here for 40 years. The most important part of it, he added, is how it is received and enjoyed. Museums do ask for his work. But what he enjoys most are the school groups who sometimes drop by.
“The kids seem to get inspired by seeing all this stuff,” Mr. Stanley said. “And they’re telling me they’re going to go home and build stuff. That always resonates with me.”
