Greg Baiden the underground engineer working on the Clock Project, just sent in these great photos of the new bookcase that he had made for his office.  On either side of the bookcase are amazingly well detailed stained glass reproductions of the planet tracking Orrery we completed in 02005 (detail image below).  Apparently there is now a desk in the works that includes inlay and stained glass of the Clock dial.  Cant wait to see that…

 

Long Now Clock engineer Paolo Salvagione sent in this excellent write up by fellow horological geek Alex Doak of Watchismo of his trip to see Big Ben ring in its 150th year.  It includes a link to animated “how Big Ben works” that is one of the best clock descriptions I have seen.  Most interesting to me of course were the descriptions of the stoppages and challenges involved:

Stoppages are rare, but the most notable are:

2007: the longest suspension of the hour strike (Big Ben) since 1990. Big Ben’s famous ‘bongs’ were silent for seven weeks in 2007, allowing essential maintenance work on the clock mechanism to take place. From 11 August to 1 October, an electric system kept the clock moving, but Big Ben, the name for the Great Bell, and the quarter bells were quiet. This was the final phase of a programme of planned works to prepare for the Great Clock’s 150th anniversary in 2009.

October 2005: The clock mechanism was also suspended for two days in to allow inspection of the brake shaft.

Over the years, the clock has been stopped accidentally on several occasions – by weather, workmen, breakages or birds. The most serious breakdown occurred during the night of 10 August 1976 when part of the chiming mechanism disintegrated through metal fatigue, causing the mechanism to literally explode under its own immense forces, dropping its weights to the base of the Tower with a noise that the policeman on duty initially reported as being an IRA bomb. The Great Clock was shut down for a total of 26 days over nine months – the longest break in operations since it was built – until it was fully repaired.

 

I found this reference (via Engaget) to a nicely executed limited edition articulated hand clock.  I continue to be amazed at the breadth of solutions to showing the time…

This is one of the first altered time lapse sequences I have seen.  It’s a great medium.  Nicely done by the Citizen watch company for the recent Basel World Watch Expo.  Clipped from William Gibson’ Twitter feed (@GreatDismal).

Swedish design group Humans Since 1982 created this digital readout called The Clock Clock made of 24 analog clocks.  Notice the time reads 09:25 digitally above.  You can go to their website to see an animation of the clocks in action as well as download the font they create. Thanks to Creobic for this link where you can find other analog digital clocks.

 

Member Austin Quig-Hartman sent in a reference to this very cool clock project by Che-Wei Wang.  It reminds me of a clock version of Art Ganson’s “Machine with Concrete.“  What I find really interesting is that the designer ended up with  3.16 billion cycles which is basically the average number of beats a human heart will beat in a lifetime.  I am not convinced the little belt drives will make it very long into the future, but a beautiful execution and thought process all around.

From the designers write up:

Can we watch decay? Can we see glass as a fluid slowly slumping and deforming over time? Everything is in constant flux, yet we consider many things around us static and fixed. 3.16 Billion Cycles is an attempt to unravel a seemingly unchanging 100 years into a set of relationships in digestible increments.

A 60 rpm (revolutions per minute) motor drives the entire mechanism. It rotates once every second. The following pulley rotates once every 5 seconds (1:5 ratio). The next rotates once every 60 seconds or 1 minute. Then 5 minutes, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, and 1 decade. The decade wheel carries the load of the large arc. The large arc rotates once every century. The final ratio between the 60 rpm motor and the large arc is approximately 1:31.6 billion.

Each wheel is marked with a black nut to highlight a position that could be tracked over time. Along the arc, 100 lines mark the divisions of each passing year. When the clock finally reaches the end of a 100 year cycle, the arc falls off its track onto the floor.

 

La Machine à Ecrire le Temps (translates to The Machine that Writes the Time).  A gorgeous piece presented at Baselworld 2009.  Our first versions of the Clock prototype worked with analog time that was converted through via a digital adder to time outputs, but it never occurred to me to write it out on paper…  Reminds me of the so very cool Difference Engine printer.  [via Engaget, and sent to me by Chris Baldwin, Thanks]

 

By the way of Chris Anderson’s TED twitterfeed I rediscovered the Artificial Owl site of “The most fascinating man-made abandoned creations + Their story and location.”  They now have a visual archive, google map, and much more content.  Really wonderful stuff, and great lessons for anyone like us trying to build long lasting artifacts.

 

 

Long Now member and close friend Susan Shea sent me this astoundingly good episode of James Burke’s “Connections”show from 01978 (It is in 5 parts).  It is the best tracing of computing technology through time and culture I have ever seen, and shows the lineage of ancient clocks to modern computers (if a computer in 01978 can be called modern, but you get the idea.) This also reminded me how good this TV show was, now I have to watch the other episodes…

Two sand calendars…  One year “hourglasses”, each claims to the the largest.  I really wonder how those bearings are holding up on the Timewheel. (More from Oddity Central with more pics.)

The Timewheel is the world’s largest hourglass, situated in Budapest, Hungary next to City Park, right of Heroes’ Square and behind the Palace of Art (Műcsarnok). It is made of granite, steel, and glass, and weighs 60 tons. The “sand” (actually glass granules) flows from the upper to the lower glass chamber for one year. – Wikipedia

And the other one from Japan filled with ‘”singing sand” at the Nima Sand Museum in Kotoga Beach: