One straightforward option to make a really correct clock is with a WiFi-enabled microcontroller like an ESP32 and a show: arrange NTP, and also you’ll by no means be off by greater than a minute. This water clock challenge by [Liebregts] is just not like that — there are not any electronics to talk of, and if the clock is ever in sync to inside a single minute, properly, we’d be shocked.
We’re impressed to see it working regardless. Certain, it’s not precisely high-tech; the floating siphon mechanism [Liebregts] is utilizing to get a gradual move out of the primary reservoir dates again to 250 BC. Then again, since this fashion of time keeper has been out of trend for the reason that fall of Rome, [Liebregts] couldn’t simply seize one thing off GitHub or ask ChatGPT to design it for them. That is actual human engineering. The reservoir is even scaled to the four-hour timing of [Liebregts] workday — it will get refilled at lunch together with its maker.
In a intelligent construct element, the floating siphon tube additionally holds a pointer to an hour indicator. For minutes, his mechanism appears distinctive, although it’s associated to a different historical trick, the Pythagorean cup. Pythagoras’s devious cup had a hidden siphon that spilled its contents in the event you crammed it past a set degree, and so does the secondary reservoir of [Liebregts] water clock.
Because the secondary reservoir is linked to a counterweight with a pivot, it goes up and down over the course of roughly 5 minutes — however quite than linking that to a different linear indicator, [Liebregts] is utilizing that mechanism to advance a saw-toothed gear that’s marked with 5-12 in analog-clock trend for a contact of modernity. See it in motion within the demo video beneath.
That final half may confuse a time traveler from Historical Rome or Greece, however they’d immediately acknowledge this creation as a clock, which many fashionable observers won’t. Nonetheless, as soon as they be taught to learn it you possibly can make certain that [Liebergts]’s associates won’t ever be late to a gladiator combat once more — and never simply because Constantine banned them in 325 AD. Apparently no one listened to that ban anyway.
