Get To The Games On Time With This Ancient-Style Waterclock

December 3, 2025 by Tyler August 2 Comments

One easy way to make a very accurate clock is with a WiFi-enabled microcontroller like an ESP32 and a display: set up NTP, and you’ll never be off by more than a minute. This water clock project by [Liebregts] is not like that — there are no electronics to speak of, and if the clock is ever in sync to within a single minute, well, we’d be surprised.

We’re impressed to see it working regardless. Sure, it’s not exactly high-tech; the floating siphon mechanism [Liebregts] is using to get a steady flow out of the main reservoir dates back to 250 BC. On the other hand, since this style of time keeper has been out of fashion since the fall of Rome, [Liebregts] couldn’t just grab something off GitHub or ask ChatGPT to design it for them. This is real human engineering. The reservoir is even scaled to the four-hour timing of [Liebregts] workday — it gets refilled at lunch along with its maker.

The water clock in all its glory, plus diagrammatic labels.

In a clever build detail, the floating siphon tube also holds a pointer to an hour indicator. For minutes, his mechanism seems unique, though it’s related to another ancient trick, the Pythagorean cup. Pythagoras’s devious cup had a hidden siphon that spilled its contents if you filled it beyond a set level, and so does the secondary reservoir of [Liebregts] water clock.

Since the secondary reservoir is linked to a counterweight with a pivot, it goes up and down over the course of approximately 5 minutes — but rather than linking that to another linear indicator, [Liebregts] is using that mechanism to advance a saw-toothed gear that is marked with 5-12 in analog-clock fashion for a touch of modernity. See it in action in the demo video below.

That last part might confuse a time traveler from Ancient Rome or Greece, but they’d instantly recognize this creation as a clock, which many modern observers might not. Still, once they learn to read it you can be sure that [Liebergts]’s friends will never be late to a gladiator fight again — and not just because Constantine banned them in 325 AD. Apparently nobody listened to that ban anyway.

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Historical Hackers: Ctesibius Tells Time

June 9, 2021 by Al Williams 11 Comments

People are obsessed with the time and the weather. We’ve talked about the weather since we were all cave dwellers hunting with spears. But the time is a different matter. Sure, people always had the idea of the passage of time. The sun rising and setting gives a natural sense of days, but daylight and dark periods vary by the time of year and to get an accurate and linear representation of time turns out to be rather difficult. That is unless you are a Greek engineer living in Alexandria around 250 BC.

Legend has it that and engineer working in his father’s barbershop led him to discover not only the first working clock, but also the pipe organ, launching the field of pneumatics in the process. That engineer was named Ctesibius and while his story is mostly forgotten, it shows he has a place as a historical hacker.

You might think there were timekeeping devices before 250 BC, and that’s sort of true. However, the devices before Ctesibius had many limitations. For example, a sundial can tell time, but only if the sun is shining. At night or during a storm it is worthless.

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Steampunk Water Thief Clock Steals Attention, Too

November 8, 2019 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

The funny thing about clocks is that the more intriguing they are to look at, the more precious time is wasted. This steampunk clepsydra is no exception. A clepsydra, or water thief clock is an ancient design that takes many forms. Any clock that uses the inflow or outflow of water to measure time could be considered a clepsydra, even if it uses electronics like this steampunk version.

[DickB1]’s sticky-fingered timepiece works by siphoning water from the lower chamber into the upper chamber on a one-minute cycle. An MSP430 and a MOSFET control the 12 V diaphragm pump. As the water level rises in the upper chamber, a float in the siphon pushes a lever that moves a ratchet and pawl that’s connected to the minute hand. The hour hand is driven by gears. A hidden magnet and Hall effect sensor help keep the clock clicking at one-minute intervals.

Although [DickB1] doesn’t tell you exactly how to replicate this clock, he offers enough information to get started in designing your own. Take a second to check it out after the break.

Most of the thieving around here is done for the joules, so here’s a joule thief running a clock.

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Daylight Saving Time – Whys And Why Nots

November 28, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 87 Comments

We recently went through our twice yearly period of communal venting called adjusting for daylight saving time (DST), or British Summer Time (BST) as it’s called in the UK. But why are we changing the time? Seriously, who caused all this? Does it do any good? Do we still need it? And what can we do about it? As it turns out, most of us want it, as you’ll see below.

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The Little Mechanism That Made Precise Time-keeping Possible

November 15, 2016 by Manuel Rodriguez-Achach 60 Comments

There are few things to which we pay as much attention as the passage of time. We don’t want to be late for work, or a date. Even more importantly, we don’t want to age and die. Good time keeping is an all important human activity, and we started to worry about it as soon as we abandoned our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and agriculture and commerce emerged.

By de:Benutzer:Flyout - own work, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Kerzenuhr.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1783765 — A candle clock

Measuring time needs two things: a repetitive process to mark equal increments of time, and a way of tracking and displaying the result. The first timekeeping devices relied of course on the movement of the sun. Ancient Egyptians, around 3500 BC, built obelisks that, by casting a shadow on the ground at different positions, gave an approximate idea of the time. Next came the use of some medium that was consumed at a regular pace: candle, incense, water and sand clocks are examples. A great advancement came with the advent of the mechanical clock, and here is where the escapement mechanism appears.

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