The Bisno Schall Clock Gallery
County Courthouse Opens Museum About Town
Santa Barbara’s newest — and smallest — museum opened last year; it’s definitely downtown’s coolest new old thing. This museum of horology (the art and science of measuring time and making timepieces) is officially called the Bisno Schall Clock Gallery. It’s in the County Courthouse tower, way up high with all of 500 square feet for 4,500 years of chronometer history masterfully depicted from Stonehenge to Santa Barbara in a 60-foot mural surrounding the tower clock’s mechanisms.
After the 1925 earthquake, the county built an elaborate Spanish-Moorish castle for a courthouse with tax revenue from offshore oil fields discovered in 1928. Among the building’s special accoutrements is its four-faced Seth Thomas Clock Company tower clock. The company was the most eminent clock maker of its time; its tower clocks also adorn Independence Hall in Philadelphia and Grand Central Terminal in New York City.
By late summer of 1929, Santa Barbara’s tower clock, Seth Thomas’s 2,744th, began telling time. Its standard five basic components — the power of falling weights; the swinging pendulum dividing equal intervals of time; a double, three-legged gravity escapement releasing energy to the transmission apparatus to the four displays of hands; and Roman numerals on the tower — have been keeping accurate time for more than 80 years.
