KENILWORTH, ILL. — Cameel Halim pauses at precisely 11 a.m. Clocks bong and chime around him as objects spin and figurines dance in ornate syncopation. The cacophony raises the decibel level in the ground-floor salons of Halim's mansion, drowning out his voice. For the moment, there is no point in speaking.
When the bells fall silent, Halim resumes, talking excitedly about the 600 or so antique timepieces he has collected for more than a decade. He plans to display them in an old Victorian house in Evanston, Ill., that he is converting into a museum. The pieces include an 18th century tall case clock once owned by a Japanese ruler, an early 17th century elephant clock from Augsburg, Germany, and a French Breguet pocket watch built for a blind man.
"Clocks have a magnificent history in civilization," Halim, 63, said amid the relatively quiet ticktock of the more than two dozen clocks and watches displayed in his home's main salon. "Today we look in our cellphones and know the time, but if you look at what the world went through to find the time, it's an amazing story."
Halim's collection tells part of that story through the gem-studded clocks and chiseled watches that were once on exhibition in Rockford, Ill., at Seth Atwood's Time Museum, which closed in 1999. Halim, an engineer who made his fortune in real estate, paid about $5 million to buy about 200 of the timepieces, including most of the European clocks from his favorite era in the science of timekeeping, called horology: 1500 to 1800, an epoch that began with the first attempts to mechanize timekeeping and ended with the Industrial Revolution.
Halim also bought Atwood's collection of American pocket watches and his 2,700-volume horology library. Those artifacts, plus 70 Tiffany and other stained-glass windows that Halim collected separately over the years, also will be on exhibition in the Evanston museum.
The vast purchase means Evanston -- which gave Halim the OK to move forward with his museum project -- will get a slice of a stunning collection that Chicago tried to get for years. Shortly after the Time Museum closed, Mayor Richard M. Daley, an avowed timepiece enthusiast, offered Atwood $25 million for his entire 1,551-piece collection, then appraised at $33 million. But the city failed to raise more than $5.6 million, including a paltry $761,000 from private donors. In the end, the city bought just 492 pieces in the collection and gave up its quest for the remainder.
