This picture of an Alain Silberstein watch was borrowed from André’s site. For years it was the definitive 24 hour watch site. André helped me with the development of this site too. Although he’s no longer maintaining this site, another site is being created to fill the gap: visit 24h.watch and watch the new site evolve.

An interesting site for those of you who love watches is Lost Times. Here you’ll find the Think The Earth watch, and, last time I looked, a beautiful Gruen 24 hour piece from the 1960s.

And if you’ve arrived straight at this page from another site, don’t forget to explore the other pages of this site, including the list of most of the 24 hour analog watches and clocks.

Think the Earth

Visit the Think The Earth web site to buy their watch, and to find out the thinking and philosophy behind the site.

Java and web clocks

The Java clock used on this site was written originally by Antony Pranata: I’ve borrowed his Java source code, and made the 24 hour analog version.

Here’s an Analog World Clock in JAVA.

Time and time-keeping

The Long Now Foundation has great ideas.

The clock will tell the time and date for 10000 years, and is intended to remind us of our responsibility to the future.

Time and Art

Try the Nelson-Atkins museum for a Shockwave/Flash travel through time: Tempus Fugit.

General clocks and calendars

Start off by looking at Paul Nagai’s page, which has lots of great links. Also try Gordon Uber’s site at ubr.com/clocks/.

For something a little more unusual, visit the Almagest site, where you can purchase an almagest, a modern equivalent of the astronomical clock.

Good books

Want to buy a book about clocks? You will probably find something at Jeffrey Formby’s horological book pages..

More unusual clocks

If you think 24 hour clocks are odd, try the Horology – The Index site for some more radical alternatives, not just for clocks, but for time-measuring systems.

Some, like the original medieval clockmakers, want to represent the full day as a circle. Others are more interested in how the day is divided, or in moving away from old-fashioned (and Euro-centric) time zones.

For starters, try:

• Swatch (1000 beats per day)
• NewEarthtime (360 degrees of time)
• Cybertime (was OneWorldTime) (minutes since midnight in Los Angeles?)
• WRLD.time HQ (metric based on International Date line)
• Hexadecimal time (techie base 16 clock).

The metric time fans have real clocks and watches, courtesy of the French Revolution and Swatch. Try A guide to metric time.

If you want 9 hour clocks (9 ‘hours’ in a day), look no further than www.stime.com, a site worth visiting for its design alone.

This is a spring-driven striking clock from Italy, about 1745-1755. The 6 hour dial may have been designed to save power when striking the hours. It didn’t catch on:

©Trustees of the British Museum

This next clock is from England, 1805-1805, and has a single hand that reads the time on three four-hour dials at the same time. So the time is either 3:35, 8:35, or 12:35. Notice the outside minutes dial shows four hours of minutes:

©Trustees of the British Museum