Stephen Hawking Unveils a "Time-Eating Clock"

Don't worry: it's not a cousin to the Large Hadron Collider, which some fear can destroy the world. No, it's not really eating time. But the Corpus Clock is certainly unusual.

On Friday, Sept. 19th, Stephen Hawking was on site to introduce the strange timepiece. The $1.8 million clock took five years to build and is totally mechanical. It is expected to run accurately for at least two hundred years.

The clock was designed and created by inventor and horologist John Taylor, a student at Corpus Christi College in the 1950s. Horology is the art or science of measuring time.

Atop the dial of the clock, the large grasshopper or "chronophage," (time eater) devours minutes in its jaws to remind viewers that time is fleeting. The clock has no hands or numerals. Instead slits are cut into its gold-plated face.

Taylor showed some humor in developing the escapement, which converts pendulum motion into rotational motion. The clock uses the world's largest grasshopper escapement, which was an invention of 18th-century clockmaker John Harrison. As Taylor intended the Corpus Clock to be an homage to Harrison's work, he turned the clock inside out and put the escapement, a literal grasshopper, on the outside.

Taylor shows off the Corpus Clock in a video below. As he says:

I wanted my clock to catch the observer's attention and to make them think. Its heritage stretches back nearly 300 year to John Harrison and his invention of the grasshopper escapement.

For the Corpus Clock, I've enhanced the image of the grasshopper into a chronophage, who munches a minute every 60 seconds.

Speaking of the chronophage, as pictured, it's definitely somewhat on the scary side. And that's what Taylor intended.

It is terrifying, it is meant to be. Basically I view time as not on your side. He'll eat up every minute of your life, and as soon as one has gone he's salivating for the next. It's not a bad thing to remind students of. I never felt like this until I woke up on my 70th birthday, and was stricken at the thought of how much I still wanted to do, and how little time remained.

Hawking, of course, was a particularly appropriate guest of honor for the event introducing the clock, being the author of the book A Brief History of Time. The Corpus Clock will stand outside the college's library and will be on view to the public.