What time is it?” That question is rarely heard anymore. Our phones don’t leave our sides, and since they keep perfect time, we’re never at a loss for the hour.
But when Grant Hall’s soaring clock tower opened in 1905, wristwatches were rare and pocket watches unaffordable for many. The structure therefore had an egalitarian aim: anyone, anywhere on campus, could know the time.
“It was a grand thing to have a clock tower,” says Duncan McDowall, Arts’72, MA’74, a Queen’s historian. “But it also served a practical purpose. It was an organizing point for the life of the campus.”
For more than a century, the square tower above the Victorian-Romanesque Grant Hall has stood as the university’s most recognizable landmark.
“It is the pin in the map of Queen’s,” Mr. McDowall says.
That has also made it a target for April Fools’ Day pranksters. One year, a giant King Kong appeared atop the tower. Another year, Mickey Mouse was placed over the clock’s stately dial, his hands telling the time. Then, in 2021, an alumni Facebook post announced the clock’s analog face was going digital. The joke fooled some.
Grant Hall has had three clocks. The first was custom built by Nathan Fellowes Dupuis (1836–1917), a professor and clockmaker who helped found the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences. However, it often ran slow or fast, or not at all. In 1993, a new one was installed thanks to Engineering Society fundraising.
But by 2016, that clock also struggled – each of the four faces showed different times. The current clock is from a Belgian manufacturer and has individual mechanisms for each dial.
Does it chime? Not now, but it could, says Jeff Elderhorst of Elderhorst Bells in Kingston, who installed it. The electronics include a system capable of producing a range of sounds, from Westminster Abbey-style bells to Christmas melodies. All that’s needed is amplification and speakers.
Professor Dupuis’s original clock had a 13-foot copper--rod pendulum with an eight-day movement. Every Thursday, workers wound it. Today’s clock doesn’t require human help. It self-corrects after power outages and automatically adjusts for daylight time.
Time, after all, waits for no one.
