10000 Year Clock Prototype, on Display at the London Science Museum
The 10,000 Year Clock
Deep inside of a remotely located West Texas mountain, a huge tunnel is being carved out to make room for a clock that will last for 10,000 years.
This clock will have massive metal gears, a huge stone weight, and a very precise titanium escapement located inside of a protective box which will house the quartz. This clock is slated to be set in motion in just a few years. This mechanical clock’s gear wheels are made out of stainless steel that turn on ceramic bearings. There are smaller pinions made out of titanium. The pendulum swings back and forth once ever ten seconds. Fully wound, the clock can last over a century without solar power. The current time will not always be displayed on the face of the clock. Instead, you will see the date and the current position of the stars and planets when the clock was last visited. The current time can be viewed by turning a wheel located at the face of the clock. This will advance the clock from when it was last viewed, moving through the present moment. There is a century hand that advances once every 100 years and a display animation that comes out from the one year, ten year, 100 year, 1,000 year and 10,000 year chambers. The first display planed for the one year anniversary, is an orrery display that will show the planets and all the spacecraft of our time leaving Earth. The other displays are still being developed.
The main power source for the clock is a weight hanging on a rack gear. The clock can be wound by the visitors to the clock. There is also a solar winder for the clock. Seeing this clock will require a real commitment. It won’t be as easy to view as OnlineClock.net 
. This clock will be located in an area that is remote and not close by to an airport. If someone wants to see the clock, they will have to drive a good distance, and then they will have to hike through a couple of hundred vertical feet to see the clock and all its parts. This trip will culminate at the clock face in the uppermost room where the clock will be located. The 10,000 year clock team are currently accepting requests to be put on a list to see the clock after it is finished!
The Inventor
I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. – Danny Hillis
The mastermind behind this project is a man named Danny Hillis. Danny is an inventor, whose company, Applied Minds, solves multitudes of problems for commercial profit. Among many things that have come out of the genius inventions of Applied Minds, is the touch screen that CNN uses as well as an early cancer detection device. Danny’s company has even been contracted by NASA to design a mock-up of a new lunar landing vehicle. Danny is described as a likeable guy who is completely obsessed with the 10,000 year clock, and he has been planning this project for the last 15 years.
It seems Danny has an obsession with the future and the clock is representative of this obsession. After reading about Danny’s plans my first thought was: “Why?” Danny attempts to answer that question and, after some pondering, it can eventually be understood. Danny is giving the clock all of his talents, and a lot of his time to remind the coming generations of what long-term planning for the future can bring about. The clock is a legacy to be witnessed by civilizations which will rise and fall while the clock keeps ticking. Still, Danny thinks most people don’t “get it.”
The Team
To make such an impressive clock display, Danny had to put a team together that not only believed in the project, but who were the best of the best in their fields. One of the first people on the project was Alexander Rose, who grew up near a ship building junkyard in Sausalito, CA. Rose took things apart and put them back together on a daily basis. He also built new things from the junk parts. From these experiences, he learned to build robots. He was the first to build combat robots for display performances, and he later developed wheeled surveillance robots. He also built robotic ships. His current occupation is working on the 10,000 year clock. Besides being the authority on bots, Rose is an extremely skilled engineer. He is just the kind of guy you would need to figure out how to carve a winding staircase through 500 feet of limestone. Rose built a chainsaw wielding robot that can do just that.During the ten years that Alexander Rose and Danny Hill worked together, there was a time when progress on the clock seemed to have stopped.
Jeff Bezos: he does more than just sell books!
Then Danny started talking to his good friend, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com (which website is that? Never heard of it!). Bezos and Danny got serious about the project and started making plans to build the clock on Bezos’s property. The Texas property is vast and remote. It overlooks Blue Origin, a Bezo funded spaceport, which has permission from the US Government to launch rockets into space. The spaceport keeps a very low profile, so as not to advertise what they are secretly developing. I’m going to take a wild guess and say it is probably passenger travel to space. Maybe a transit system of sorts, piloted by Bezo’s version of Buzz Lightyear to take us to infinity and beyond for some amount of money we might, or might not be able to afford. But that’s just a guess. When asked why he decided to put the clock on his spaceport property, Bezos stated that it was just a cool coincidence.
Once the chainsaw robot had been built, Danny and Bezos employed a stone cutter to carve out the staircase. The stone cutter on the clock project is Stuart Kendal. Stuart became obsessed with rock in the 1980s while visiting Germany. After seeing a large stone sphere floating atop bubbling water, he was amazed. He found a way to do this himself and made a successful business out of the spheres, selling them to wealthy clients in the Northwest. However, the clock project has him quite excited, and he thinks less about spheres and more about using Rose’s giant chainsaw to carve out the staircase leading to the clock. Stuart is happily carving massive rock and fashioning the staircase with the new robot chainsaw and loving every minute of it. He too believes in this project and also believes the concept is long-term planning.
The next experts invited to participate in the 10,000 year clock are machinists to make the components of the clock and later put them together. The machinists are Chris Rand and Dave Miner. Rand and Miner possess the skills to carve and polish steel to micrometer tolerances, and they love working on large scale projects. They are currently working on an eight foot wide, 700 pound gear wheel for the inner-workings of the clock. There will be two other giant wheels just like this one installed in the clock. Then there are the Geneva wheels to contend with. There will be 20 Geneva wheels inside of the clock. They will rotate and set off the chimes of the clock in a unique sequence of 365 million possible tunes. The chimes will only sound off when people are there to see the clock. This way, no tune will ever be repeated. Rand and Miner are also are excited about the clock, as they have never worked on anything like it before.
Project Funding
The Dream Team of clock makers are steadily working to further this massive project to fruition. Some of you are probably wondering what this is costing, as did I. It seems Bezos’s Amazon success has afforded him in excess of 42 million dollars to finance the clock (!). Bezos’s vision of the clock is much like the rest of the team. They cite the future as the reason for building the clock. At first glance, most might wonder what that really means. Four thousand years from now people will again ask: “Why?”
We all think about the future to some extent, but in recent times, committed visionaries are a rare find. Whether society liked the former visionaries or not, they were there to guide us to envision a longer-term mindset of our endeavors, and what they may produce; not necessarily for us, but for those who will come after us. Bezos uses the example of: “If I asked you to solve world hunger and I told you that you have five years in which to do it, you would say no. Of course, no one could solve a massive problem like that in such a short time span. But if I asked you to solve world hunger in 200 years, this completely changes the problem. It actually changes the activities around the problem.” It is this mindset that the clock makers are trying to convey to future generations.
Visionaries from Another Place in Time
Imagining a long-term endeavor and taking action to accomplish the goal is the whole idea behind the clock. I thought I had heard this before, and I have. I remember watching a film of President John F. Kennedy addressing Congress and asking them to fund NASA and its space program. He said: “Now it is time to take longer strides–time for a great new American enterprise–time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.”
During that speech, JFK said we would put a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, and we did. Perhaps the 10,000 year clock reminds us to create goals for generations to come and not to always live in the short-term.
Men like Danny Hillis may think that no one “gets it.” I think people will “get it” Danny, we just haven’t seen it in a very long time. Marvels like space travel and 10,000 year clocks will inspire future generations and civilizations to come.
OnlineClock.net hopes this will inspire us to make the necessary sacrifices to solve our problems in order to move forward with the desire to improve ourselves as a species.
More information on the 10,000 Year Clock can be found in the wonderful Wired.com article on this subject (we’re not worthy!).
A Clock That Ticks Just Once A Year is a post from: Alarm Clock Blog, the official blog of the original Online Alarm Clock.
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