The 24-Hourglass

This project is the last one for my Light and Sound Math/Science course. For this project we studied clocks and I don't mean a traditional clock. We studied clocks from all over the world and from all different time periods. The purpose of this Action Project was to take the knowledge that we acquired about clocks and use that to redesign our own clocks and make an animated video explaining how it works and why we did what we did. I learned a lot about clocks and I actually did not realize just how many clocks there are in the world. I was also surprised to find that you can even make a clock with no modern materials at all. I am very proud of my design because I feel that I put a lot of thought into it and I feel that if I were to actually create my clock it might actually work. One thing that was rather difficult about this project was making the video. The reason I feel that it was so difficult is because I did not have anything to record with initially and drawing the same object over and over is very tedious and tiring. Please enjoy my Action Project and video below!



My time-telling device will be rectangular with little sheets of metal inside of it and in between of the sheets will be sand. The sheets of metal will be attached to a gear that will pull a sheet out every hour which will let go of the sand and will fill up the hourglass until you get 24 hours. To reset it there will be slots that you will be able to put the sheets in after you flip the glass. My time-telling device works in hours and each metal sheet is about 5 cm apart and is filled completely with sand so when the sheet is fully pulled out it will fill up a tick mark and let you know that it has been a full hour. The way it implements sound is the way the gear ticks every time that it rotates and I also plan to have a small plastic edge to the end of the sheet so when it comes out of the hourglass it will scrape against the edge of the glass and make a distinct sound that alerts you that the sheet is fully out.

My device is an effective way of telling time because it doesn't work like a normal hour glass; it tells you 24 hours and it will also tell you a percentage of an hour by showing how much sand has filled up the tick mark when you check; if it is halfway to the tick mark than it is obviously 30 minutes but unfortunately it can not tell you exact time. In addition it only needs to be reset once a day unlike an hourglass that would need to be reset every hour.

The math that goes into my device is simple. The glass itself is rectangular and is 6 inches tall and 4 inches wide each way. Another math concepts that my device demonstrates is radius and circumference. The way it demonstrates those concepts is with the gear that controls the device. The radius of my gear is going to be .5 inches which mean i would have to do 2x3.14x.5 which will give me a circumference of 3.14.

Citations
T & K Young. "Hourglass History." Web log post. Hourglass. T & K Young., 2000-2014. Web. 20 Mar. 2015. <http://www.tkyoung.com/history.html>.