The last weekend I spent at home, I stumbled upon this odd installation apparently recently unveiled by Stephen Hawking adorning the front of Corpus Christi College near the Cambridge market. It's a hideous bug/insect/creature sat on top of a huge gold dial that displays a blue light show of hours, minutes and seconds in some revolutionary way of showing the time... and it cost £1 million. The insect thing moves its mouth up and down and crawls around the clock ( well it moves from underneath it ) and it looks, I thought, just a bit horrible and unsightly! It's strange what some people do with their money..
---Dr Taylor is an inventor and horologist - one who studies the measurement of time - and was a student at Corpus Christi in the 1950s. He has given the clock as a gift to his former college. The grasshopper or "chronophage", meaning "time eater", advances around the 4ft-wide face, each step marking a second. Its movement triggers blue flashing lights which travel across the face eventually stopping at the correct hour and minute. But the clock is only accurate once every five minutes - the rest of the time the lights are simply for decoration. ---
"Conventional clocks with hands are boring," he said. "I wanted to make timekeeping interesting."
"I also wanted to depict that time is a destroyer - once a minute is gone you can't get it back.
That's why my grasshopper is not a Disney character. He is a ferocious beast that over the seconds has his tongue lolling out, his jaws opening, then on the 59th second he gulps down time."
Nice!
