Raphael Thys
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
I call him a clocker. Which makes sense because he’s a clock. Maybe “Tocker” would have been better, but he looks like a Clocker. And anyway, the name has stuck now.
Clocker is a mahogany Winchester chiming mantel clock. The chimes go off every quarter of an hour, like a naturally occurring Pomodoro every fifteen minutes. He’s an antique, which brings to mind collectors and dusty shops, but he came from eBay and was about the same price as a modern battery clock.
Clocker sits on my mantlepiece, with the wireless router on one side and a lightning cable on the other. It’s a strange, anachronistic collection. The future nestling against the past. Clocker probably dates from around 1920. If he’s treated well, there’s no reason why he won’t still be ticking and tocking in 2120. My wireless router dates from around April. I’ll be pleased if it’s still routing in a couple of years. This old clock stands in such stark contrast to everything else in my house. “I have a kitchen knife that I am going to use for the rest of my life,” Everest Pipkin remarked on Twitter, “I can’t say that about a single piece of electronics I own.” I think sometimes of the people who bought the $10,000 gold Apple Watch Edition (first generation), which now no longer receives software updates. Do they still use it and just accept that the software is slow and outdated? Imagine, in fifty years, receiving that “antique” watch from a Great Aunt’s will.
The problem is we keep wanting our electronics to do new things. It’s not just that they are fragile, no longer receive software updates or become slow, it’s that new things are invented rendering the current things obsolete. When it comes to clocks we haven’t added any new features lately. There are no new hours in a day. A minute is still a minute. 101-year-old Clocker’s feature set is pretty similar to any standard wall clock you would buy on Amazon. Except you have to wind him.
Clocker is an eight-day wind-up clock, which means that every week I use a little metal key to wind each of his winding holes until they won’t wind anymore. “Don’t overwind,” it says on the internet, and when I first start winding him, I am terrified that I will wind him to destruction.
Watching him go, I can’t quite get my head around clockwork. A series of springs and cogs power him for a week, just from me twisting a key. There is no power lead. I don’t need to plug in a USB cable. He doesn’t contain a lithium battery. There are no solar panels or magnetic coils for electromagnet induction. He works in a completely different way from everything else in my house. I think he may be the only moving device I own that isn’t powered by electronics. If the power was shut off for a few weeks, my gadgets would run down, except Clocker, who would keep going as long as I kept remembering to wind him. It’s so beautifully efficient, it makes me wonder what possessed us as a society to turn away from such an elegant solution and instead fill everything with lithium batteries that explode or degrade or cause havoc in landfills.
Clocker isn’t without his problems. At first, he won’t chime, and when I do get the chimes working, he is out of sync, chiming the hour at quarter past. But after a few rotations, he rights himself. Evidently, I know even less about clockwork than I thought, but at least I was right to name him, as he clearly has agency. He runs a little fast, which is because his pendulum is not “balanced.” The solution is to bend the pendulum slightly until he stops going “tick-tock” and instead goes “tick-tick.” It feels strange and fiddly unhooking the delicate pendulum and bending the metal. This is an awful lot of faff just to get a clock working. But then I think back to when the Windows Time Synchronisation service went wrong and my computer clock gradually got out of sync. The technology may change, but the fiddling remains. All technology involves tinkering.
When I was little, the only people I knew with winding clocks were my grandparents, and so the act of twisting that little metal key was linked to them. They were old and their clocks were old. Young people had battery clocks. It was as if we had all agreed to own clocks that were built after our birth. I used to consider the clock-winding antiquated and annoying. Imagine having to wind your clock every week! It’s only struck me now that their wind-up clocks always showed roughly the right time, in contrast to all the ovens and electronic devices I see flashing 12:00 due to a power cut or battery drain that has wiped clean their memories and left them to start over. I find winding the clock faintly therapeutic. Much more so than holding “mode” for ten seconds and pressing “+” until “Date/Time” appears on the screen.
Every time I hear the Westminster Chimes, I think of my childhood. But other people have different associations. Most famously (and most sonorously) the chimes can be heard on Big Ben, echoing out over the Houses of Parliament in London.
What I didn’t realize is there are words to go along with the chimes; a clock-work karaoke set:
All through this hourLord be my guideThat by Thy powerNo foot shall slide.
(That said, I tend not to sing along.)
There’s a simple pleasure to be had from winding Clocker. I feel decoupled from the grid. Perhaps this is a minor “prepper” tendency in me. I am ready now with my wind-up clock for the breakdown of society.
Getting Clocker comes at the peak of one of my “low-fi” phases. I’ve spent the last fifteen years flip-flopping between “smart” and “dumb” devices. One year, I buy Wi-Fi radios, smart speakers, smart scales, filling my house with cables and adapters. The next I am sickened by the cables coiling in every corner, every plug always charging something, and vow for a wire-free life of empty surfaces. But it’s remarkable how much technology I have to buy to rid myself of my technology. To get rid of a set-top box, I buy a new TV. If I buy new plug sockets, I could get rid of some USB adapters. I could lose a cable by getting a wireless keyboard. I could probably get rid of more cables if I bought more things.
Many of the devices I have are irritating and unreliable. My wireless keyboard sometimes doesn’t connect to my computer. The wireless mouse has a charger on the bottom so can’t be used while charging. The wireless charger charges more slowly than a cable would, while using more power. Last November, AWS, the Amazon-owned infrastructure service that powers much of the internet, suffered a partial outage, taking a number of websites offline. More unexpectedly, all sorts of “smart” gadgets stopped working too. Smart doorbells stopped ringing. Smart vacuum cleaners stopped cleaning. Smart scales stopped weighing. There was a new generation of devices flashing 12:00.
Battery-powered clocks don’t use much battery. Many go for years before their AA batteries need replacing. But they still take some power. I think of all the similar small ways I use, or waste, power. For every LED that is lit, for every battery-powered device that is on, somewhere, some carbon is added to the atmosphere. Sometimes it is worth emitting carbon to get that power. I wouldn’t begrudge someone the carbon a life-saving dialysis machine generates. But other times, it is just wasted. The lights illuminating empty rooms. The speakers blasting sounds no one wants to hear. The computers on standby, computing nothing. We use energy because it’s there, not because we actually need it. These things might not use much energy, but if they provide no benefit, no amount of carbon emission is acceptable.
Thus I’m delighted when I come across solutions like Clocker. Clocker arrives into my life around the time I discover Low Tech Magazine, a website powered by a server connected to solar panels. The background of the site fills with yellow depending on how sunny the day is and how charged the batteries are. “This is a solar-powered website,” the strapline says, “which means it sometimes goes offline.” There’s something joyous about the lack of resilience. If it’s a cloudy day, maybe the website won’t be running. That’s okay, wait for the batteries to charge up and it’ll be back.
Is it really necessary for every website to always be online? Perhaps it would be better if we accepted a little less resilience in our lives. Websites go down periodically anyway (and when Twitter goes down, we all give a sigh of relief). Rather than attaching our doorbells to the internet, and creating reasons to make things more reliant on each other, how much nicer to disconnect the things that don’t need connecting.
My non-smart, but still electronic, doorbell has been playing up in the most annoying way possible (some water got into it, causing it to ring constantly at 2 am). I notice when messing around with it that the door of my Victorian house still has a mechanical wind-up doorbell. I remove the layers of paint added by decorators over the last century and the bell starts working. It needs winding once every month or so, but the batteries never need charging and it won’t randomly go off at 2 am. And no matter what happens to US-East-1, I’ll still know if there’s someone at my door.