Crazy Clocks: Interesting Machines That Tell Time

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The 2004 movie Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban popularized the idea of candles as time keepers by featuring tall candles that resembled the human spine with dates printed on the vertebrae that burned down to indicate the day or year. However, candles being used as devices to measure time have been around a lot longer than Harry Potter. The first indication of these instruments being used for more than light in dark places is seen in a very early Chinese poem from 520 CE where graduated candles are detailed as a means of determining the time while the sun is not apparent in the sky—the problem with only using a sundial as a means of telling time. However, even though the candle clock is used frequently throughout Asia, spreading to Japan during the 10th century, the most commonly mentioned early candle clock is the one attributed to England’s King Alfred the Great during the late 800s CE. He used a collection of six candles that burned away completely in four hours with segments marked on each candle that were twenty minutes each. Candle clocks are similar to hourglasses in this way that their length of burning (or pouring) was predetermined then utilized over and over to calculate time as a measurement instead of being “shown” the time on a modern clock.

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Any one who has enough experience with a computer to have seen the spinning of a hard drive knows how beautiful and hypnotic it can be with the right effects. Even though a hard drive might be broken for practical use in a computer does not mean that it is completely useless anymore as a hard drive clock can be created with any hard drive that is still able to spin. With some technical knowledge and some elbow grease, one can manipulate this computer part to become a creative clock. The time piece works by the removal of the top of the hard drive and then the cutting of a slot into the platter itself. To add more style to this simple design, lights are then generally mounted underneath the platter to flash and glow as it spins. If the maker is very talented, they can even arrange the timing of the lights to look like actual clock hands.

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Modern clocks have worked hard to get to the point where they are of the utmost accuracy—think of the atomic clock. However, creative new clocks have started to reach outside the box of merely being digital numbers to dictate people’s lives by becoming more abstract in their time telling abilities. The concept of the “Re-clock” is a new idea that does not show minutes but simply the twelve hours in a day that are gradually revealed in a cloth-like clock face from midnight until noon when it is then started over again to show the current hour.

Author: Brooke Windsor — Copyrighted © roadtickle.com