this goes along with the escapement workings that I posted
John Taylor's Time Eater
A unique public clock built as a tribute to John Harrison's grasshopper escapement, the Corpus Clock, was unveiled at Corpus Christi College, (Body of Christ)Cambridge University, in Cambridge, England on September 19, 2008. Industrialist John Taylor spent £1 million building the mechanical clock. Feeling that Harrison's escapement was not well enough known, the clock's grasshopper escapement is exposed on the top of the clock, built in the form of a demonic grasshopper called the "Chronophage" or "time eater", which rhythmically opens and closes its jaws, representing time being devoured.
The clock's face is a rippling 24-carat gold-plated stainless steel disc, about 1.5 metres (4 ft 11 in) in diameter. It has no hands or numbers, but displays the time by opening individual slits in the clock face backlit with blue LEDs; these slits are arranged in three concentric rings displaying hours, minutes, and seconds.
The arrangement of slots in each disk, along with the rotation of the foremost disk of each pair, creates a Vernier effect, producing the illusion of lights rotating at various speeds about three concentric circumferences on the clock's face.
The pendulum speeds up, slows down, and sometimes stops, but returns to the correct time every five minutes.
A CAMBRIDGE clock which cost £1 million has broken down three times since it was unveiled last month. It took seven years to build.
Engineers spent yesterday morning getting the gold-encrusted timepiece going again, after it stopped the previous evening.
The latest glitch occurred when safety checks by an internal computer picked up a fault in a temperature sensor. The clock automatically came to a halt, at 5.35pm on Monday, and due to a "communication error" this was not reported to engineers until yesterday (Tuesday, 14 October).
Inventor and sponsor Dr John Taylor said it was the third stoppage since Professor Stephen Hawking revealed the device, on the corner of Trumpington Street and Bene't Street, on September 18.
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 loudly 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.
a four minute incredible video to really get a sense of it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCqGtvTA36k