Qualla: Zimmer Tower

Zimmer Tower: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sally V, CC BY-SA 4.0. In a small pavilion next to a medieval keep in Lier, a metal pointer is moving so slowly that nothing you can do will let you see it move. The pointer is one of 93 dials on the Wonder Clock built by Louis Zimmer between 1932 and 1935. It tracks the precession of the Earth's axis, the slow wobble that takes our planet's rotational pole through a full circle every 25,800 years. The pointer will complete one full revolution sometime around the year 27,800 AD. The clock was prepared for the 1935 Brussels world exhibition, then toured the United States. Albert Einstein, who saw it at the 1939 New York World's Fair, wrote to Zimmer to congratulate him on the achievement. The Wonder Clock is still there, still running, still tracking the precession. So is the asteroid named for Zimmer himself.

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Image: Sally V | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zimmer Tower: Self-Taught in Astronomy

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bora.mardan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Louis Zimmer was born in Lier in 1888 and trained as a clockmaker in his father's shop. He had no formal astronomy education. He learned the math by reading books, working out the period of the lunar cycle and the equation of time at his workbench, then building gear trains to tr...

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Image: Bora.mardan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zimmer Tower: The Wonder Clock

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the Jubilee Clock was installed Zimmer kept building. The Wonder Clock, completed for the 1935 Brussels world exhibition, has 93 dials displayed across multiple faces. Some track ordinary things in extraordinary detail: tides at six different ports, sidereal time, the daily...

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Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 4.0

Zimmer Tower: How the Tides Dial Works

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer), CC BY 4.0. Consider just one dial out of 57, the one for tides at Lier. The pointer shows a small ship riding above or below a flag. When the ship sits high and the flag has no streamer, it is high water. When a streamer trails above the flag, the tide is flooding. Below the flag, it is ebb...

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Image: Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer) | CC BY 4.0

Zimmer Tower: Asteroid Number 3064

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 4.0. On October 27, 1984, the astronomer Eric Walter Elst discovered an asteroid in the main belt and named it 3064 Zimmer. The name was chosen for Louis Zimmer. A second asteroid, 1664 Felix, had been discovered in 1929 and named for the writer Felix Timmermans, a Lier neighbor who p...

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Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 4.0