Stephen Hawking to unveil strange new way to tell the time

[n2doc]

Prof Stephen Hawking is to unveil a remarkable £500,000 clock with no hands that pays tribute to the world's greatest clockmaker.

One clock made by the legendary John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude, took 36 years to build and he was still calibrating it when he died at his home in London on March 24, 1776, his 83rd birthday.



The Corpus Clock will be unveiled by Prof Stephen Hawking
The Corpus Clock has been invented and designed by Dr John Taylor for Corpus Christi College Cambridge for the exterior of the college's new library building.

It will be unveiled next week (19th Sept) by Prof Stephen Hawking, cosmologist and author of the global bestseller, A Brief History of Time.

Dr Taylor, an inventor and horologist who studied at the College in the 1950s has put £500,000 of his own money and seven years into the project.

"One of my heroes is John Harrison," he says.

Of Harrison's many innovations, he came up with the 'grasshopper escapement', explained Dr Taylor, referring to the device used by Harrison to turn rotational motion into a pendulum motion for timekeeping.

"No one knows how a grasshopper escapement works, so I decided to turn the clock inside out and, instead of making the escapement 35 mm across, it is 1.5 m across," said Dr Taylor.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/09/14/scihawking114.xml

[bleever]

1. Fascinating.

Thanks for posting this.

[NV Whino]

2. I would love to see this in action.

[Arctic Dave]

3. Wow. That is stunning.

[Dudley_DUright]

4. Here is a nice link on John Harrison and his clocks

http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/john_harrison.htm

[ColoradoMagician]

5. I love science.

...

[pokerfan]

6. Last time I was in London

I made a point of visiting the National Maritime Museum which has an impressive collection (two million items) of various items relating to navigation, astronomy and chronology including the Harrison Chronometers.

It is most impressive.