The Draft

Ex ball clock.

In its first life (1992), it was the dial of a huge alarm clock.
To do this, I had to invent a clock whose display (hours, minutes and seconds) would be made by balls. In fact, all I had to do was to drop one per second into a test tube that could not contain more than fifty-nine balls. The sixtieth ball would then roll over the others and fall into the minute ball, thereby activating a valve that released all the seconds at once. The same principle being applied to the hours and days, we had a completely original and precise dial at the same time. A few options had to be added to make it a real clock: minutes, hours, days of the week, months and days of the month, even lunars to fill a horrible empty space.
The whole thing was built in a cellar with a hand drill and a small soldering station for all the tools. It was at this point that the very last problem had to be solved: the set was too big and would not fit through the door of my workshop…
All the parts of the clock were dismantled and hacked off ten years later, and what remains here is now just its useless dial, a still life
.