Most clocks just tell time, simply and reliably. Not the $1.8 million "time eater" formally unveiled Friday at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.
The masterpiece, introduced by famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, challenges all preconceptions about telling time. It has no hands or digital numbers and it is specially designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up from time to time.
Inventor John Taylor used his own money to build the clock as a tribute to John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the grasshopper escapement, a mechanical device that helps regulate a clock's movement.
Taylor said he also hopes the clock will remind people of their own mortality.
Rather than having it toll the hour by a bell or a cuckoo, the clock relies on the clanking of a chain that falls into a coffin, which then loudly bangs closed.
Weirdly, the clock's pendulum slows down or speeds up. Sometimes it stops, the chronophage shakes a foot and the pendulum moves again.
"There are so many expressions in everyday life about time going fast, time going slow and time standing still," Taylor said.
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