Every day, between 7am and 11pm, our fear of time here in Smyrna is embroidered with a conspiracy of melody and clockworks that declare the hour graphically and in tympany from a brick cupola, about the size of an average guest bedroom, perched atop the Smyrna Community Center and capped, appropriately, by a four-sided pyramid, with, as Howard Carter and his boy king would expect, a hidden entrance.
The clock’s familiar melody consists of only four notes: G#4, F#4, E4, and a bass note, B3, and is known to clock makers of the last two centuries as Westminster Chimes, or alternatively, Westminster Quarters, referring to the four stanzas played every quarter-hour.
The Community Center was constructed as part of the 1989 Downtown Smyrna Development Plan and completed the same year that Best Picture Oscar went to ‘Dancing with Wolves,’ a little thing called the World Wide Web went live for the first time from CERN in Switzerland, and the first cellular phone towers became part of our skylines.
The digital tech revolution not yet having reached time keeping, the original Smyrna clockworks were purely mechanical requiring regular human intervention to correct the heroic but imperfect measurement of a second by windings, gears, and pawls, as well as the vagaries of Daylight Savings.
A technology refresh in 2014 replaced the mechanical system with a custom electronic equivalent created by 182-year old Verdin Company, maintained by Georgia’s own White’s Clock & Carillon in Sharpsburg. The bells of our clock tower are, in fact, high-wattage loudspeakers, each about the size of the book-return box at the Smyrna Library next door, mounted on each corner of the Community Center roof.
A stereo system sized stack of battleship gray boxes on the ground floor automatically adjust the minute hands, each as long as an average Smyrna Elementary School 2nd grader is tall, as needed for Daylight Savings and rare power outages. For Fall Back, the boxes command the minute hands to lay dormant at 2am Sunday morning for an exact hour, letting time and the Universe to catch up. For Spring Forward, pulses are sent double time to advance the minute hand one complete revolution. The hour hand, ever the faithful puppy, follows behind in precise increments, ten to each hour. “Like setting a wristwatch,” says Smyrna’s Facilities Maintenance Tech Alex Warner, whose responsibilities include, among other things, keeping the monster clock and its serenade punctual.
The audible and visual result of this collaboration would return Charles Dickens to Elizabeth Tower housing the famous bell, Big Ben, as well as Victor Hugo and his hunch-back to Notre Dame.
So that you might sing along the next time you’re near to hear, here are the stanzas of Westminster Quarters, a prayer meant to assuage our fear of time:
At 15 minutes past the hour:
All through this hour
At 30 minutes past the hour:
All through this hour,
Lord be my guide
At 45 minutes past the hour:
All through this hour,
Lord be my guide,
That by Thy power
And finally, at the top of the hour, before striking the count:
All through this hour,
Lord be my guide,
That by Thy power,
No foot may slide.