Room tower
The Zimmer Tower (formerly: Corneliusturm ) is a clock tower in the Belgian city of Lier , which was named after the clockmaker Louis Zimmer .
The year of construction of the original Corneliusturm is not known exactly, but is before 1425. It was initially sold in 1812 by decision of the local government, but bought again after the First World War because the city council wanted to demolish it.
In 1928, on the occasion of Belgium's imminent 100 years of independence, Zimmer donated his Jubelklok clockwork mechanism , which displays different times and astronomical events, to the city of Lier . It was decided to house the clockwork in the dilapidated Cornelius Tower, which had to be rebuilt and restored. The total cost of the renovation was around 170,000 Belgian francs and the work was largely carried out by volunteers. The revelation of the restored tower took place on June 29, 1930 and since then it has been called Zimmertoren (Zimmerturm).
Another astronomical clock , de Wonderklok , has been located in an outbuilding of the room tower since 1960. Zimmer was congratulated on this work by Albert Einstein , among others . In addition to a multitude of other displays, the movement contains the slowest rotating hand in the world. This shows the precession movement of the earth's axis and takes around 25,800 years to complete one revolution. Zimmer later added a planetarium to the clockwork.
On the square in front of the tower a picture of our solar system has been set up, which contains the two asteroids (1664) Felix , named after the Belgian writer Felix Timmermans , and (3064) Zimmer , named after Louis Zimmer.
Web links
- Zimmertoren - the official website (Dutch) ( Memento from May 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 51 ° 7 ′ 45 ″ N , 4 ° 34 ′ 11 ″ E