I wished I had had more time to visit this clock when I was in Cambridge. It was really an honor to see it. The clock was invented and designed by Dr. John Taylor. Dr. Taylor want to show time in a more creative way. He graduated from Corpus Christi College with a degree in Natural Sciences. Dr. Taylor. has more degrees than this and he also has 400 patents to his name. This is just a small part of Dr. Taylor’s life. His accomplishments are many. He is an inventor, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and a horologist. Horology is known today as the study of mechanical time-keeping devices. Plainly stated, it’s a person who studies time and how to represent it but it’s really much more involved than that. Dr. Taylor saw time as our enemy and he deliberately made the clock to look terrifying. In an interview he said he never felt this way. until he woke up on his 70th birthday and realized how much he still wanted to do and how little time he had left. Here is a quote from him about how he felt about time. “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.”
The Corpus Clock is totally a mechanical clock. It sits at street level outside the Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College. The Clock is a 24-carat gold-plated stainless steel disc. It cost 1.3 million pounds to make in 2008. That would be 1.7 million US dollars today but the clock is priceless. No price can be put on this clock. There are no hands or numbers on the clock. The face of the clock shows time as a wave coming out from the center of the universe. There are individual slits on the clock face that open and are backlit by blue LED lights. This is how you tell what time it is on this clock. Surprising the LED lights are only 60 watts and there are only 2,736 lights.
If you look closely, there are three dials on the clock face. The largest dial, on the outside, is measured in seconds. The LED blue lights race around the clock measuring one second at a time. I have made a close up of the clock so ya’ll can see the blue LED lights at the bottom of the picture on the outside dial. The second dial tells how many minutes it is. The minutes in the picture would be 21. The small center dial tells you the hour so in the picture the hour is 1 o’clock. The time on this clock is 1:21 or in military time 13:21. There is no designation of AM or PM like modern clocks today. I checked this time by the time stamp on the photo of it and it’s correct. Dr. Taylor donated this clock to the undergraduate library at Corpus Christi College.
Now for the Chronophage. It is the large grasshopper on top of the clock. A Chronophage is a time eater. At 30 seconds past each minute, the mouth opens and snaps shut when the minute is gone eating up another minute of our precious time. To make things more morbid, there are no bells to alert you of a new hour. Instead there is a rustling of chains and the sound of a hammer striking a wooden coffin. Students find this very annoying while they are studying in the library. The inscription on the pendulum reads, “John Taylor from the Isle of Man made this in 2008.” The clock has 50 tricks it does on certain dates. The inscription, in latin, at the bottom of the clock reads, “The world passes away and the lust there of.” The shield below the pendulum is the shield for Corpus Christi College.
On. September 19th, 2008 at 5:45 pm, theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author Stephen Hawking unveiled the clock in a large ceremony at Cambridge. Professor Hawking was obsessed with time. This was a hard blog to write and hope ya’ll enjoy it.
