My mom insists I’m hard to shop for. Anything I want, I tend to get myself, and often my needs and evaluations of a thing are just plain…ornery.
When I was perhaps ten years old, I got as a gift a cool clock that told the time using marbles. The idea was: once per minute, a ball would be brought up to the top of the assembly, and then, via a series of rockers and levers, balls would fall to indicate the time. There were three “displays”: an hour place, a five-minutes place (5, 10, 15, etc), and a “four minutes place” (where you add the number to the ones in the fives place, so you might see:
- X X X X
1 2 3 4 - X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X
5. 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 - X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X. X.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.
Making it even a little less obvious, is there was a ball on the hours track that was fixed in place: it always had to be at least 1 o clock, but that ball didn’t move, and it was different from the other tracks.
So something like:
- XX
- XXX
- [X]XXXXX
Would be 6:17. (Obviously, having the numbers on the bottom of the track would make it easier to read than having to do the math, but it wasn’t totally intuitive).
When a track filled up, it would tip over, and dump one ball to a lower track, and dump the rest to the spare ball pool.
I will admit, it’s a cool concept, and especially cool when an hour rolls over, and even cooler at 12:59, when everything cycled. Twice a day. At 1:00. In my bedroom.
It was not a quiet device, and as you can see by the image above, it came with a domed cover that, counterintuitively, served to amplify the noises it made. By the very nature of how it worked, there was no “silent mode”. It was a clock that could only be read with the lights on, and only up close. There was no alarm function (unless you wanted to wake up at 1am). And it was only as accurate as the motor on the back (which was, effectively, an invisible seconds hand).
I will admit, that there’s an interesting science-fiction purpose to this, that a person being kept in a dark cell could keep himself sane by carefully listening to the difference in the sounds of the marbles. But when you’re a nice year old trying to do homework, or sleep, or do pretty much anything, that isn’t what you need.
What kind of place would you put such a thing in? Not a bedroom. Not a library or a study. Not a room where you wanted quiet to do other things like watch TV or relax, or an office. I’m sure if you’re the right kind of ADHD person, you’d be okay with it, but I know I personally have days where every noise is an addition to my stress load.
But it was a cool sciency-toy from the cool sciency-toy-store that every mall had one of back in the day.
All that might have been okay, except for the final nail: the thing got stuck, kind of a lot. It jammed. Sometimes the balls would overfill the track and not tilt; sometimes the little ball-grabber would fail to grip one and bring up nothing; sometimes it would get stuck and rattle. I spent time balancing it, putting dimes under each of the little rubber feet, sitting with a torpedo level, trying to get it perfect on the X/Y and diagonal X/Y axes. Nothing helped.
And, insult to injury, it came with exactly as many balls as it needed and no extra, so if you lose one — and with the tracks jammed — they went everywhere, it no longer kept time.
When we moved, I lost track (no pun intended) of it. That would have been the end of it, except, just a few years ago, my mom found a website called Bits and Pieces. They sell Jigsaw puzzles, and apparently, sometimes, clocks.
And she got me this one, again, from that site, “Because you had so much fun with it when you were little”. Literally, anything else from that website would have been something I could have spent hours doing, alone or with friends, but in her wisdom, she looked for the one clock on the puzzle site, that failed to be a clock. (They no longer sell the thing, for what it’s worth).
Now, I am a sucker for a cool clock, and years later (after she bought me this one), I’d buy my first Nixie Clock:and while it doesn’t have all the features I’d like (GPS sync would be nice), it is beautful, warm and retro, and modern all at the same time.
And while ultimately, the one I want is one I solder together myself from a kit, this one’s pretty solid. It’s silent, and pretty, and you can dim it at night and still have it keep time. And it’s the kind of thing the cool science toy store in your local mall would have sold, if they knew what kind of retrocomputing nerd your kid would one day grow up to be.
In doing reseach for this article, I found that the plastic one I had was a reproduction of a much prettier, wooden thing, over at idle-tyme.com. I’ve never tried those, but they apparently are hand-made and perhaps better tested. One day, maybe, I’ll try them out.
