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comment by goobster
goobster  ·  1519 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The 10,000-Year Clock Is a Waste of Time

There is one interesting line way the fuck down in the article about the clock that says:

    "... Visitors enter through jade-paneled doors, climb a massive staircase to reach a cupola made of sapphire glass. There they can wind the clock mechanism ..."

And I thought, hey, if they make it an interesting enough tourist attraction, it doesn't need to be a perpetual motion machine... just let the visitors wind it up.

All you need to do is have a couple visitors a year, and it runs forever. (Assuming there are still people to visit it, of course. And if there aren't, well ... problem solved.)





kleinbl00  ·  1519 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah the timekeeping mechanism and the time-displaying mechanism are separate. You show up and "wind" the motion works to the point where they hit the stops. We call that a remontoire in horology.