Hundred-year mechanical clock
Here's a sweet little student project from ITP: a clock that counts up to a hundred years and falls apart:
The 100-Year Alarm Clock lives every second (via Cribcandy)
Showing 'Time in Six Parts,' the clock "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."The 3.16 Billion Cycles Clock, with the time in six part series, is perhaps an attempt to present time in a prospective like never seen earlier. If with this the designer intended to take time beyond our consideration and explore its new realms, he has by far succeeded in his effort, but still the clock remains routed to the core, by living every second till eternity (we aren't living an age to see a 100 years pass).
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Attach it to pull the trigger of a gun as it falls and you'll have a clock that cleans your clock.
I love this unconditionally and forever. Like a desktop version of Long Now.
It's like Universe Man's watch in the TMBG song — "he's got a watch with a minute hand, a millennium hand and an eon hand..."
Spring forward, fall apart.
@PHIKUS point the gun at box with a cat in it. When the gun fires, is the cat alive or dead?
What about daylight savings?
If the cat has been in the box for a hundred years, it's probably dead.
The student's name is Che-Wei Wang. If you have Make magazine issue 17, he's on the inside of the front cover with another of his projects.
But is the motor designed to last for 100 years of continuous operation? If not, is it easy to replace?
BoingBoing doesn't strike me as the kind of place that would showcase planned obsolescence....
Anon@~5: The cat would be alive in that instant, but the clock would no longer measure this span of time. If it stayed alive, one might wonder, who let the cat out of the box?
But I would like to know...
In 100 years, will anyone be around to hear the clock fall, and if not, will it make a sound?
or...
What is the sound of one cat napping?
XD
Is there a warranty so that the clock can be replaced if it only last 98 years?
You could use it as a metronome for "As Slow As Possible", now playing at the St. Burchardi church. They started playing it in 2001. There's still time.
If you hurry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_As_Possible
This is how the dashboard clock works in a GM car, right?
I'd like to see a one-year version that looks like a regular clock. It'd be a great gift.
This reminds me of Arthur Ganson's sculptures at MIT. One specifically, the "gears with concrete"
- the ratio of the entire sequence of gears will take hundreds of years to move the concrete a visible amount (or stop the motor).
http://www.arthurganson.com/pages/Sculptures.html
The electric motor might make it to the end, but I'm skeptical about the belts. There are indeed public clocks which have been running (with some downtime for regular maintenance) for hundreds of years, but they use gearing, not belts.
While aesthetically very beautiful, I'm wondering whether those pulley belts are likely to last 100 years before perishing...
Arthur Ganson is the fucking bomb
The Wonderful One-Hoss Clock?
Offhand, as there's no scale reference to estimate their thickness, those look like cassette deck capstan-style belts. Yeah, they won't last. Unless the clock comes with a family of clock technicians equipped with a few cases of Rubber Renu.
He should have opted for stainless steel belts. THEY would last 100 years.
I heard that it comes with a 99 year guarantee.
It's the Clock of the Not-So-Long Now! (Long Now Millennium Clock)
See also, Tim Hawkinson, Spin Sink (1 Rev./100 Years) (1995), a 24-foot-long row of interlocking gears, the smallest of which is driven by a whirring toy motor that in turn drives each consecutively larger and more slowly turning gear up to the largest of all, which rotates approximately once every one hundred years.
I work at a nursing home, and you'd be surprised at the number of people who live past 100. Just saying...