24 hour

Venice clock

Here’s a good picture of a 24 hour analog clock in Venice.

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Andy took this photo, and says:

…a clock just over the Rialto bridge. There is a flea market around you but if you turn and look up, there it is. Very strange as the hours don’t start/end where you would expect. I heard a strange story about this clock… I was told that the Venetians used to re-set the clock every day. When the sun rose, it was six o’clock. So at dawn, the clock was set to six. And that is where the clock sits now. It doesn’t run, or at least it wasn’t when I was there. Do you know if there is any truth to this?

Ryan’s clock

Ryan Provost emails:

I created a 24-hour analog clock this weekend. The clock also has a metric time dial (in 1/100 day), and a 40-hour dial (because there’s 400 gradients in a full circle, 100 grads per 1/4 circle). All I need is a clock mechanism kit, and a AA battery, and to set the time, and I’m gonna show it to everybody!

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Looks like an nice design.

Day and Night

The Masterpiece Jour et Nuit is a clever design by Maurice Lacroix which uses a technique developed in the 18th century. The single hand carries moon and sun symbols, and goes round once a day. This makes for an elegant display, although it wouldn’t be popular with astronomical purists, being a good representation of the positions of the sun and moon only once a month, around the time of the full moon. There’s another example on the Design page of this site.

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Elgin marvel

Claire writes to tell us about her new 24 hour watch, an Elgin dating from the 1940s.

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She found it in a tiny watch repair shop in her town, after some time searching for a decent 24 hour analog watch.

Keep looking in those small watch and antique shops for collectable items like this!

Owners of Elgin watches are fortunate in being able to find out so much about the company’s history at Elgin watches.

Konfabulator

For my Mac I’ve created this 24 hour analog clock by adapting a cool 12 hour clock provided by the extremely cool Konfabulator.

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The works of the clock consist of a short JavaScript program (Konfabulator provides a JavaScript engine to animate your creations). You can create a face for the clock using any graphics program – this was my first effort in Adobe Illustrator.

Swedish clocks

From Sweden, Sylvie emails to tell us about her work with 24 hour clocks:

In Sweden we have been developing new ways for people with development disorder to handle their everyday activities. A very difficult field is to handle time. Time is hard to get a grip on when you are not able to think abstract or have trouble making a plan in your mind. It’s too many thinking activites involved at the same time. In Sweden we have developed several technical aids and some methods to help simplify handling time issues. One of these are 24 hour clocks.Unfortunately we do not have home sites in English that describe our work with this.

The best site to get to know what we are dealing with is www.pajalaklockan.com/. You can click below the clock icon on Tidshjalpmedel. Now there is a menu where you will find the Swedish word dygnsklocka which means 24 clock.

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There are three models right now. The first one was developed in the northern region of Sweden where it hardly ever gets dark in the summer time. This created lots of trouble for people with thinking difficulties. A man who worked at a daycare center developed it to help some of his mates. Now they are selling it. It’s called Pajalaklockan after the village. It has plastic bits for every half hour that you can put messages, symbols on, and they come in different colours making it possible to mark the working hours in different colours from freetime and sleeping time.

Star time

I’ve been looking at the Zeitladen site and, being far from fluent in German, I can’t decide whether they’re selling standard 24 hour clocks and watches or sidereal (sternzeit or star time) versions.

If you watch a particular star and make a note of when it is highest in the sky (its transit time) on two successive days, you’ve measured a sidereal day. A sidereal day is about 23 hours and 56 minutes.

If you set two clocks, one showing sidereal time, the other 24 hour time, to tell the same time as each other, starting at September 22 or so (the Autumn equinox), the sidereal clock would run faster than a 24 hour clock, gaining 4 minutes in the course of every 24 hour day. After 6 months, the sidereal clock would be 12 hours faster. After a year, the sidereal clock would be exactly a day faster: there are 366 sidereal days in a year.

I presume that astronomers like to use sidereal clocks because it helps them locate stars.

Do they also use sidereal watches? Is this a sidereal watch?zeitladen1.jpg

What about this clock?

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I can’t decode the German text enough to find out.

Visually there seems to be no difference between the design of the 24 hour and sidereal dials. So you would be well advised to place one of these sidereal clocks next to an ordinary 24 hour clock, or else clearly label it as sidereal. As for watches, you could wear the sidereal watch on your right wrist, the ordinary 24 hour watch on the left…

I’ve had watches and clocks that seem to gain 4 minutes a day. Perhaps they were sidereal and I didn’t know it.

Zeitladen also sells radio-controlled sidereal clocks.

The Zeitladen site was interesting, particularly if your German was good!

The site is now closed, unfortunately.

Jack’s bad day

Here’s somebody who really needs a genuine 24 hour clock. This publicity photograph for the second series of TV show 24 (just started in the UK) shows a 24 analog clock measuring Jack Bauer’s bad day for him. It’s only 03:30 in the morning (by the 24 hour clock on the wall) and he looks tired already. (I don’t think this scene appears in the show – in fact I don’t think the show contains any references to 24 hour clocks or 24 hour time.)

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Photo credit: Dan Winters (Radio Times magazine)