My Girlfriend’s Clock

You can spend a lot of time looking at a clock (or reading about one).

When you look at a clock, you probably see what time it is. But when I look at a clock, I see, well, all sorts of stuff.

Let’s start with this: A clock can have either a sweep second hand, which moves in a smooth, continuous motion, or a tick-style second hand, which ticks off each individual second in a stop-and-go motion. The clock in the video shown below, which my girlfriend, E, has on her dining room wall, has the tick style, one aspect of which really bugs me. Play the video and see if you can spot what it is:

The extremely irksome problem, as I hope you noticed, is that the second hand’s individual ticks don’t align with the markings on the perimeter of the clock face. Instead, the ticks land in between the markings. This is easiest to see as the second hand ticks its way past the numerals. Here, for instance, are two screen shots from the video, showing how the second hand looks as it approaches and passes the 8:

See how it sort of skips over the 8, instead of aligning with it? So according to this clock, it is never 40 seconds past a given minute — it can only be 39½ and 40½ seconds past. The same thing happens as the second hand passes the 9, the 10, and the 11:

Arrrgh! The misalignment is infuriating. If you want to get a sense of what it’s like to view the world through my eyes, this would function nicely as Exhibit A. It’s the kind of thing I can’t help but notice.

I was all set to tell E that her clock was failing a major test of clock-worthiness. But as I shot some video of the clock’s movements, I noticed something odd: While the second hand didn’t properly align with the markings on the left side of the clock’s face, it did properly align with the markings on the right side. Look:

Hmmm. Why would the second hand align properly with the numbers on the right side, but not on the left side? The answer, I quickly realized, is simple: gravity. When you watched the video at the top of this article, you may have noticed that the second hand wavers or wobbles a bit as it ticks off each second, indicating that there’s a bit of give or leeway in the gear mechanism driving the hand. On the right side of the clock, gravity pulls the second hand down to the front of that leeway-driven range, creating the proper alignment with the face markings; on the left side, however, gravity pulls the second hand to the back of that range, creating the irksome misalignment.

If you had trouble following that explanation, just watch this next video clip, and pay particular attention to what happens to the second hand as it moves between the 6 and the 7:

Did you see how the second hand’s behavior changed just after it passed the 6? I’m no mechanical engineer or physicist, but it seems clear to me that gravity is pulling the second hand downward just a teeny-tiny bit at the end of each tick, which results in proper alignment on the right side of the face but improper alignment on the left side. (If you want to see more, there’s about two minutes’ worth of clock video here.)

E says she’s had this clock for about 30 years, so maybe the second hand used to be more precision-aligned and has developed that leeway due to all those years of use. Or maybe it’s always been like this and she never noticed. Either way, there’s a simple way to avoid this problem: Always get a clock with a sweep second hand.

Meanwhile, there’s another key test that every clock must pass: Does the minute hand point directly at the proper marking when the second hand hits 12? Almost, but not quite:

As you can see above, when the second hand hits 12 (left), the minute hand is just shy of the 42-minute mark. The minute hand finally points directly at that mark nine seconds later (right).

That leads us to another question: At the top of the hour, when the minute hand is pointing directly at 12, is the hour hand properly aligned with a number? I had to shoot a separate video sequence for that, and it revealed something surprising: At 8am on the morning of July 16, the second and minute hands were properly aligned, with both of them pointing at the 12 at the same moment, without the nine-second lag! Look:

And was the hour hand also properly aligned at that moment? Not quite, although I had to draw a straight line to be sure:

I added the thin yellow line so we can better see exactly where the hour hand is pointing.

In short: E’s clock has a lot of inconsistencies. That’s a bit annoying, but at least it makes for an interesting discussion topic. Time well spent!

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As you may have noticed, I’ve now done three new posts in as many days. That pace won’t be sustainable, so don’t get too used to it, but I wanted to hit the ground running with the new project.

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Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.