We’ve seen our share of complicated clocks, but we’ve never seen anything like Felix Vorreiter’s FLUX 1440. This clock displays the time using a simple pulley system, and over 3,900 feet of white string.
The white string is covered in what looks like random marks, but they are anything but random. As layers of the string align inside the clock’s pulley systems, so do those random marks, which tell you the current time every minute. It is an amazing design, but with about three-quarters-of-a-mile of string. If something goes wrong, this will be a major pain to fix. It’ll be like that scene in Sleeper where all the reel-to-reel computer tape gets tangled.
Regardless of the potential for nasty tangles, it’s an engineering marvel, and great fun to watch in action. Just try not to trip over that mess of string on the floor.