Corpus Clock

No serious blog about clocks would be complete without mentioning the new Corpus Clock which can be found outside the Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

The Corpus Clock is a new representation of time invented by Dr. John C. Taylor, in which no hands are used but instead light from LEDs is shown for hours, minutes and seconds emanating from various slits in the numerous golden discs of the clock. The slits are controlled by mechanical gears which open and close the slits within the clockwork.

The Corpus Clock is a true mechanical clock and has nothing to do with computers, which is something rather unusual in this day and age. There is in fact something charming and old-fashioned about the device, especially when you hear the sound it makes as it churns away the hours, minutes and seconds:

John Harrison created a device about 300 years ago called the Grasshopper Escapement that was the model for the Corpus Clock.

According to Wikipedia:

An escapement, a part of every mechanical clock, is the mechanism that releases the clock’s gears to move forward by a fixed amount at each swing of the pendulum.

The Grasshopper Escapement actually has nothing much to do with grasshoppers. Still, as a kind of insider joke, Dr. Taylor alludes to the Grasshopper Escapement with the addition of a large monster grasshopper to his Corpus Clock, which sits at the top of the clock and moves its claws and body with the advancement of the clock’s gears.

Taylor refers to this monster insect on his clock as a “Chronophage” which means “time eater” in Greek. The insect does indeed have an unsettling effect on the viewer, as it eats away the minutes, and the viewer perceives the passage of time as something more of a negative than a positive occurrence.

One more effective reminder that time is short and it’s time to seize the day, right now!

The Corpus Clock was developed in over 5 years’ time with over one million pounds in funding and the help of over 200 different people.

That’s a lot of time and money for a scary clock, and to the best of our knowledge it doesn’t even have an alarm clock function!

It’s just our opinion, but we at Online Clock are much more populist in our orientation, and we’d like to think that we’ve developed a clock which is even more useful for more people. (OK, perhaps we’re not entirely unbiased – but their clock’s discs have 24-carat gold plating – is this really necessary?!)

Rest assured, Online Clock, was developed in far less time with much less funding and manpower than this esteemed, fascinating and yet strangely elitist device called the Corpus Clock.