NORWAY – The historic E. Howard clock in the Norway Opera House tower will be ticking again soon.

Jim Bryant of Wayne, keeper of the town’s 120-year-old timepiece, said the clock will be working as soon as a new motor drive arrives. The clock, which has been running on solar power since last fall, stopped ticking weeks ago.

Although it is unclear what happened, it appears that one of two wires going to the clock broke around the time final work on the $1.1 million restoration of the Opera House — including installation of LED lights on the clock tower — was being completed.

What will change as a result of the problem is the way the clock operates. Last summer, Bryant installed a 12-volt, DC solar panel on the south side of the bell tower to move the clock’s hands.

“The solar panel plan is dead,” Bryant said. That plan was expected to save the town operating costs in the long run and be more reliable in case of a power bump.

“It (the clock) will be on electric drive as soon as (the motor drive) comes,” he said.

Bryant said his solar system had been working well, but he was waiting for a man in New Hampshire to develop the next step to make the bell striker solar powered. Because it will no longer be solar powered, the panel will be removed, and it will be reverted back to electric.

The motor drive is in the mail, said J.J. Smith, president of Smith’s Bell and Clock Service in Mooresville, Ind., just outside of Indianapolis. His company was contacted to build an electric motor to drive the clock. 

“We have a full machine shop, and we fabricate an electric pattern for new brackets and new motors,” Smith said Wednesday. The mechanism only weighs a few pounds. “It’s pretty straightforward,” he said.

The E. Howard clock originally ran with a weight-driven system that failed and was replaced with a less costly electric system in the 1950s. In 2007, the bell stopped working when a partial roof collapse at the Norway Opera House cut electrical power to the building. Town officials found a way to keep the clock ticking by “borrowing” power from the adjacent former Woodman’s Sporting Goods store. A 110-volt temporary electrical wire was strung from that building to the clock tower, four stories above it.

That enabled the clock to run on AC power until last summer when the motor was fried again, perhaps due to a lightning strike, Bryant said at the time.

He said the manufacturer stopped making the mechanism to drive the clock, so he proposed a plan to run the clock by solar power.

The solar panel harnessed the sun’s energy and stored it in a battery pack that operated the motor for the clock. The next step, he said, was to change the bell striker to solar operation which would take more amperage, especially to strike the bell at noon and midnight, when more chimes would be sounded.

In 2012, the Board of Selectmen voted unanimously that the tower, with its historic E. Howard clock and bell, should remain in the hands of the town. The massive three-story building on Main Street was transferred to the Norway Opera House Association with a permanent easement given to the town in order to access the tower.

The clock was made by William Blake, a 19th-century bell maker from Boston with ties to Paul Revere, who cast the first bell in America in his Boston foundry in 1792.

In 1894, Norway Business Association agreed to build the Opera House and clock tower. The association raised more than $800 to buy the clock, which cost about $500.

The bell is made of 80 percent copper and 20 percent tin, measures 38 inches across and hangs from a beam in a small room with four open arched windows. A hammer strikes the outside of the bell on the hour. 

When it struck the hour for the first time in November 1894, the Oxford Democrat observed that the clock “speaks out in clear tones each hour and is a credit to the place.”

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