When you first encounter the Water Tower Clock by Strange Inventions, it might catch you off guard. The creator looked at a pile of inexpensive glass bottles and envisioned a way to display time. Each digit on the clock is a fifteen-segment display using small glass bottles in place of LEDs. When filled with dyed water, a bottle indicates an active segment. Empty, and it disappears. Arranged correctly, these bottles form numbers, telling you the time, such as 4:37 PM, entirely with colored water. Initially, the idea seems absurd, but witnessing it in action makes it seem almost intuitive.
The genius behind this design is Strange Inventions, who didn’t aim for efficiency. Instead, he created something visually captivating. This approach stands out in an industry focused on optimizing displays for thinner, brighter, and more energy-efficient designs. Here, someone asked, “What if we used water in tiny bottles?” Miraculously, it works.
Complex engineering
Building the clock involves complexity. It employs 60 pumps overall, using a stepper-driven peristaltic pump combined with membrane-pump boosters to direct dyed water to the necessary bottles for each digit. The water serves purely as a visual display, while electronics keep time. The mechanism to clear the bottles is ingenious — instead of using separate pumps for each, a servo-driven linkage flips all nine bottles in a digit at once. This single motion resets the digit efficiently. The creation of this 3D-printed mechanism involved substantial troubleshooting, yet the final result operates effortlessly.
Materials and costs
The tiny bottles were sourced from a random store, costing only 10 cents each. This sounds economical until you build an entire clock, pushing the project’s overall cost to about $580. This highlights the charm of independent makers — cheap materials paired with an expansive vision.
A unique visual design
The Water Tower Clock occupies a unique category. It straddles the line between art and gadgetry, with the patience of a kinetic sculpture and the practicality of a functional timepiece. The way dyed water catches light, fills each segment slowly, and dumps deliberately when a digit changes bestows a rhythm absent in most digital objects.
Projects like this prompt us to rethink display design. We’ve grown accustomed to LEDs and screens, but Strange Inventions questions if there could be more intriguing materials. Answering with dyed water and glass bottles, the outcome is a memorable piece of functional design.
While not practical, requiring maintenance and susceptible to power failures, its value lies in the emotional response it evokes. It’s not about revolutionizing clock displays; it’s about making you feel, a feat many technologies fail to achieve. Strange Inventions truly lives up to the name.
Source: yankodesign.com