The Allen-Bradley Clock That Ships Navigate By

On October thirty-first, nineteen sixty-two, the Allen-Bradley Company dedicated a clock tower on its manufacturing complex on West Greenfield Avenue that immediately became one of the most recognizable landmarks in Milwaukee. Each of the tower's four clock faces measures forty feet and three and a half inches in diameter. When it was completed, it was the largest four-sided clock in the world, larger even than Big Ben's clock faces on the Palace of Westminster in London.

The tower rises two hundred eighty feet from street level. It requires about thirty-four and six tenths kilowatts of electricity to light and operate. The clock faces are octagonal, reflecting the outline of the Allen-Bradley company logo, a detail that says something about what industrial Milwaukee thought a civic landmark should look like.

Harry Bradley, one of the company's founders, intended the tower to function as the village clock for the neighborhood, a point of shared time for workers in the surrounding industrial district. It became something more. On clear nights the clock faces are visible miles out onto Lake Michigan. Great Lakes shipping crews used the tower as a navigation landmark for decades, orienting themselves by the illuminated faces when approaching the Milwaukee harbor in darkness.

Allen-Bradley began in nineteen oh three, the same year as Harley-Davidson, which tells you something about the concentration of mechanical ingenuity in Milwaukee at the start of the twentieth century. The company built electrical controls and industrial automation equipment, the kind of product that makes other factories run. It was eventually acquired by Rockwell International and renamed Rockwell Automation. The clock tower remains the most visible thing the company ever built.