Thursday, September 25, 2008

Four Foot Wide "Time Eater" Clock


Our friend Rafael Fabre, who blogs often about the steampunk happenings in Second Life, recently pointed out this wonderful clock. From BBC News:

Designed by John Taylor, and unveiled by Stephen Hawking, its Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, and features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time.

Dr Taylor told the Daily Mail newspaper he decided "to turn the clock inside out... so you can see the seconds being eaten up".

"Conventional clocks with hands are boring," he said. "I wanted to make timekeeping interesting.

"I also wanted to depict that time is a destroyer - once a minute is gone you can't get it back.

"That's why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time." Ferocious and grasshopper are not words you often hear in the same sentence, but this one looks mean enough to eat up all my spare time...

It's gold plated and battery powered -- I would have preferred they saved his money (all million pounds of it) by using brass, and designed gear based movements for it. Oh well!

4 comments:

Cade said...

I like the use of natural history in decor. The grasshopper's face looks a little bit like a baby alien from the Alien series, doesn't he? He also reminds me more of a cricket than a grasshopper.

Nevertheless, it's a very interesting piece!

Art Donovan said...

Magnificently weird!
I do love it so.
Most impressive.
Thanks for the post.

Adam said...

Hey, just wanted to say I love the blog and follow it constantly. I really wish there were more like it. I thought you might like this article at unclutterer and the Homes and Garden list it links to: http://unclutterer.com/2008/09/29/hideaway-sink/

Here's a good article too: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1595812/20080926/abney_park.jhtml

SteamPunk Angel said...

to Adam, I saw that article on mtv earlier, that's shocking that a tv channel like mtv would know about steampunk,

if anyone wants here is an art nouveau style font and its free

http://www.dafont.com/art-nouveau-caps.font

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