NEWS
& EVENTS

April 14, 2009

Contact: Amy Hewes
College of Engineering
805-756-6402
ahewes@calpoly.edu

Cal Poly Students Help Preserve the Engineering Heritage of Bavaria

In 1842, Johann Mannhardt built the clock that would chime the hours from the tower of the Frauenkirche Church in Munich, Germany, for 120 years.

When it came time to replace the clock, it was removed to the basement of the Deutsches Museum, the equivalent of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., where a design team at the Munich University of Applied Science had the opportunity to discover its groundbreaking engineering secrets. The team was lead by guest professor Dr. Frank Owen from Cal Poly's Mechanical Engineering Department.

"Along with railroads and steam engines, clockworks were a cornerstone of the beginning of modern engineering," says Owen. "And this particular clock was revolutionary because Mannhardt figured out how to make the clock's components with much better precision than had been possible before then."

Owen began the Mannhardt Clock project with an international team of students, who worked with a master clockmaker, Hungarian Thomas Rebényi. "We learned about old mechanical stuff and Thomas learned about the magic of modern solid-modeling software," says Owen. "This was a difficult task; it resembled a gigantic reverse engineering project, where one takes an existing machine and tries to re-engineer its design." 

When Owen came back to Cal Poly, he brought the project with him and four ME students took it up as a capstone design project: Jesse Chestnut-Linn, Jared Walton, Eric Roesler, and Steffen Hausler. Their goal was twofold: first, to document the technological history of the clock-scholarship that will become part of the collection of the prestigious Deutsches Museum for use by technology historians-and also to build and animate a working computer model of the clock for museum visitors.

Walton, Roesler and Hausler were fortunate enough to spend a month in Germany, donating their expertise to the Deutsches Museum to work on the project. Hausler says, "It's amazing to go overseas and work with international partners-science is truly an international language."                                                                                                                       

"These students have banked a lot of goodwill in Germany," notes Owen. "Cal Poly can be proud of role we've play in supporting a piece of historical technology."