As a little kid in the early 1960s one of our neighbors had a digital clock. Really. It was a mechanism like an mechanical odometer, with one drum for the hours, one for the 10s of minutes, one for the minutes, and one last one for the seconds.
The seconds drum had 00, 10, 20, …, 50 printed on it and rotated smoothly and continuously. Much like a mechanical odometer, when the seconds hit 50, that engaged something like a pawl to rotate the minute drum ahead by 1 as the seconds moved from 50 to 00. Same for the 10s of minutes drum and the hour drum when it was their turn to move.
That thing fascinated 5yo me. Waiting to watch the drums turn was just great.
I ran an experiment today where I asked five people aged 25 to 56 to read clock faces I had drawn on a whiteboard. I asked them separately not in a group (I have one-on-ones with my team on Tuesday).
None of them said “half past”, “twenty past” or “ten to”. The 56 year old said he remembered it from his childhood but now it seems old fashioned to him.
The younger people said they only encountered it in fictional contexts.
This made me realize, the only analog clocks in my home do not display the correct time, because I never bothered to replace the batteries in them. They are purely decorative. 100% of the clocks in my home that actually work are digital. And none of those are purely clocks, they all serve some other purpose – the ones on the microwave and stove, my alarm clock / radio, and cheap clock /radio / old style iPod dock I picked up at a thrift store mostly for the radio function.
One of the non-functional analog clocks is a Kit Cat Klock, which never really kept good time when it did work.
I did for a while back when I wore an analog watch, because it does feel more natural to me to express it that way when using an analog timepiece, but I stopped because it just seemed to confuse most people.
That’s more or less how flip clocks work, too. Just with a mechanical mechanism that causes the numbers to flip when the drums reach a certain point rather then smoothly rotating numbers. So even though they display the time “digitally”, fundamentally flip clocks work like analog clocks. There’s a good video on the Technology Connections YouTube channel if anyone wants to see all the details of how they work.
Yeah, we bought one of those and it’s not reliable. Sometimes the eyes and tail stop, but the clock keeps working. I wonder if removing the batteries and hardwiring a power supply would work.
My roommate in my freshman year of college had one of those blasted flip clocks. I’m a light sleeper, so every minute it seemed like the clicking would wake me up. Then at the top of the hour the cacophony of the flipping was like being at a railroad switching yard. I’m exaggerating a bit, I guess. And I love watching those old-timey flip boards in railroad stations in Europe.
My second year in college, I bought a new-fangled red LED quiet digital alarm clock from Radio Shack. That sucker has run continuously since 1978.
I can’t stand an inaccurate digital clock in my house, or elsewhere for that matter – I’m the guy who always sets the clocks on the office microwaves. But for whatever reason the two inaccurate analog clocks don’t bother me. As I said earlier I pretty much just consider them decorations at this point.
There isn’t a natural way of 10 after 9 in Japanese. We do say “nine half” 9時半 for 9:30 but there isn’t an expression for “nine quarter”. More people used to say 10 to 9 ( 9時10分前) but in business then giving the straight time 8:50 is more common.
