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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  1520 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.





goobster  ·  1519 days ago  ·  link  ·  

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.