CAMBRIDGE, England — Most clocks just tell time, simply and reliably.
Not the $1.8 million “time eater” unveiled Friday at Corpus Christi College here.
The masterpiece, introduced by famed cosmologist Stephen Hawking, challenges all preconceptions about telling time. It has no hands or digital numbers, and it is designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up.
Inventor John Taylor used his own money to build the clock as a tribute to John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the grasshopper escapement, a mechanical device that helps regulate a clock’s movement.
Making a visual pun on the grasshopper image, Taylor created a demonic version of the insect to top the gold-plated clock where it devours time.
The beast, with its long needle teeth and barbed tail, rocks back and forth, inserting its talons in notches at the top of the clock to move it forward. Halfway through the minute the grasshopper’s jaws begin to open, snapping shut at 59 seconds.
“Time is gone; he’s eaten it,” said Taylor, who calls the oversize grasshopper “Chronophage,” which translates to “time eater.”
“My object was simply to turn a clock inside out so that the grasshopper became a reality,” Taylor said.
At the unveiling, Hawking predicted the creature atop the clock would become “a much-loved, and possibly feared, addition to Cambridge’s cityscape.”
Taylor said he also hopes the clock will remind people of their own mortality.
Rather than having it toll the hour by a bell or a cuckoo, the clock relies on the clanking of a chain that falls into a coffin, which then bangs closed.
“I’m in my early 70s, and I realize that time is a destroyer,” Taylor said in a telephone interview. “When you’re a young person, you think there is plenty of time. The sound was to remind me of my mortality.”
The clock, 4 feet in diameter, displays time using light-emitting diodes. The light races around the outer ring once every second, pausing briefly at the actual second; the next ring inside indicates the minute, and the inner ring shows the hour.
The clock’s pendulum slows down or speeds up. Sometimes it stops, the chronophage shakes a foot and the pendulum moves again. Because of that, the time display might be a minute off, but it swings back to the correct time every five minutes.
“There are so many expressions in everyday life about time going fast, time going slow and time standing still,” Taylor said. “Your life is not regular; it’s relative to what’s going on.”
