Last month, while leading his historic campus clocks tour through the College of Engineering dean's office, geography professor Bruce Hannon interrupted his own presentation to reach for the cellphone in his pocket.
But instead of taking a call, Hannon thrust the phone's oversize clock display into the air before him and silently counted down toward his own, personal near-precision nirvana.
Hannon gets like that when he sees a mechanical clock built more than 100 years ago successfully compete against space-age technology.
And the 1898 self-winding clock in the engineering office - which he restored - did so in state-of-the-art fashion, its beautifully clacking, cumbersome hands matching the phone's muted digital display to the minute.
"I've really got that one nailed," he said proudly, depositing the phone back into his pocket and casting an admiring glance to the old-timer for a job well done. "The technology difference here is just fantastic."
Hannon's academic passion is economic and ecosystem spatial modeling, work that started in the 1970s when he helped lead the UI's research effort at the Center for Advanced Computation to track the flow of energy from the ground to all products and services in the economy.
But he is almost equally drawn to the elegant simplicity of the mechanical clock, spending a good part of his free time over the last 40 years unearthing the mysteries that lie behind each numbered face. He's spent at least the last two decades repairing the campus's turn-of-the-century, historically relevant clocks.
"I've been building up this set of clocks for more than 20 years," he said. "Mostly, it's taught me a lot about patience."
Hannon's love for old clocks is more than a troubleshot quest for mechanical near-perfection, though he is hardwired to apply those terms to everything around him.
"I have this ability to look at a clock as a kind of system," he said. "I started out looking at it like, 'Maybe it's this, nope it's that' - so after 40 years I've finally learned a little bit about clocks. While I know they're not alive, at times it does seem like it because each has its own personality."
And personality implies a backstory, something Hannon is equally compelled to share.
Hannon plans to tell those stories through a set of impromptu public tours he's setting up to begin this fall semester. So far he's given two tours and recently invited Inside Illinois along for one. The tour started at the dean's office in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, where one of the last clocks produced by Champaign-based National Self-Winding Clock Co. in 1900 hangs; it also traverses seven other campus locations where Hannon has restored historical clocks.
"I have a strong sense of place for this area and for this university," he said. "The tour will include a little building history along the way as well. I think it will help people get a better sense of place and how special this place is."
Hannon first stepped foot on the UI campus as a student in 1952, became an instructor in 1965, and then a full professor in 1970 after earning his doctorate in engineering mechanics. Other than a short professional stint at a local company (where he continued to attend UI classes), and brief service in the U.S. Army, Hannon never left.
In that time he's not only repaired historic campus clocks (and in the 1970s started work on the Urbana courthouse clock tower that led to a $1.2 million privately financed restoration project in 2009), but has learned the unique history behind each, derived from a mix of research, hand-me-down stories and his own recollection.
In times of change, when reflection can give way to reaction, it's easy for the members of an institution to forget what made it successful in the first place.
Hannon doesn't want anyone to forget.
"Continuity is important," he said. "When we respect the past, we're better able to look to the future."
It only takes a few hundred steps to follow Hannon backward in time, each clock on the tour a ticking and precise reminder of the university's cutting-edge presence over the eras.
Take the clock comfortably hanging in the engineering dean's office, for example.
Before the turn of the century, time itself - or at least its uniform telling - was often in question, with clocks all over campus individually set and wound. Wristwatch technology was still nascent, and if you checked the time of 50 self-set pocket watches, chances were good none of them would be the same. Not to mention most timepieces of the era were simply too expensive for the general public.
Those factors made scheduling meetings and classes difficult, and starting and stopping times were decidedly ambiguous. In essence, the campus was a hodge-podge of time zones where being several minutes early or late for a meeting was expected.
Enter Stillman Williams Robinson, the UI's first mechanical engineering professor.
He worked to establish a common campus time system and enlisted the students of his Class of 1878 to construct a clock tower at University Hall. (That clock also is a part of Hannon's restoration tour and now is housed in a special case inside the Mechanical Engineering Building.)
Students used the Robinson clock to time the ringing of the campus bell, which signaled the start and stop of classes. But that system was replaced a few decades later by a new technology that allowed campus clocks and bells to be controlled by a single clock. That controller clock, used until the 1960s, is the restored version now hanging in the engineering office.
"This was the clock that ran all of the bells and office clocks throughout the university," he said. "This was a pretty important clock but it sat in a back room and nobody ever saw it."
He said few other public institutions of the era had such an intricate, high-tech system.
"Whatever anybody else did, the University of Illinois did it in spades," he said.
Hannon said he spent years repairing the clock and that many pieces in its works had to be redesigned and reconstructed.
"In a way, it fits with the deeper interests I have," he said. "It's more like an ecosystem than you might think, and the rule of preserving an ecosystem is 'save all the parts.' "
Another notable clock on the tour once belonged to renowned Austrian geneticist and friar Gregor Mendel, who is said to have used its alarm each morning in the 1870s to check on the status of his pea varieties - studies that led to him posthumously being credited for discovering genetics.
"He used it to wake himself up every morning, and somehow we ended up with it," he said.
The UI already owned the original notes of Mendel's studies and the story of how the clock arrived here crosses paths with a Princeton professor who was given the clock as a souvenir.
"He had made this sort of trip to 'Mecca' to see where Mendel had done his work," he said.
Hannon said work on the clock, currently kept on a wall and hand-built case in the UI Archives, was complicated by many factors, including finding replacement string for the clock's weights that matched the size and texture of the worn-out original.
Such a small factor can lead to ongoing inaccuracy - something Hannon will not tolerate and that leads him searching for an answer.
"Some of these I'll have for several months because they have some subtle problem that I can't quite put my finger on," Hannon said.
But when he does, like with the Mendel clock, a piece of history comes alive.
"Now the alarm is an everyday event, just as it was for Mendel," he said.
To sign up for a tour this fall, contact Hannon at bhannon@illinois.edu.