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kleinbl00  ·  1540 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The 10,000-Year Clock Is a Waste of Time

Speaking as someone with an outsized love for stupid clocks, I'm of a few minds.

That's the Turler clock. It lives at Turler Jewelry and Watches in Zurich and it accurately displays the orbit of Pluto, among other things. It was designed by Ludwig Oechslin, who was an archeologist hired to restore the Farnese clock at the Vatican and did such a good job documenting it that he got a Ph.D in philosophy out of it (yeah I'm fuzzy on that, too). The Farnese clock, for what it's worth, was commissioned in 1700 or so and was gifted to the Vatican in like 1800-something.

It's all monuments to excess and I love them dearly. The thing is? It'd all be dust in a hundred years if there weren't humans tending to their care and feeding. So while I can appreciate the engineering challenge of making a timekeeping mechanism that'll last ten thousand years it seems kinda pointless to not just, I dunno, engrave the maintenance routine on a brass plate or something. I mean, you have to assume some sort of semi-continuous cultural heritage in order for anyone to give a shit.