Happy New Year’s Eve!
Our last show of the year is about time, and a very unique clock that doesn’t so much tell the time as it writes the time out.
This was a project in 2016 by Kango Suzuki, a college student at the Tohoku University of Art and Design in Japan.
It’s called the Plock, and it’s all mechanical; no electrical parts.
To keep time, it uses four weights and over 400 hand-carved pieces of wood, many of them gears.
In the middle of all these moving pieces, there’s a little white screen that contains metal particles, similar to what’s inside an Etch-a-Sketch.
When the time changes, the screen tilts backwards, which erases the old hour and minute.
And when the screen returns, four magnetic pens direct the little particles to display the new time.
Suzuki made the Plock as his final project for college, and along the way he tweeted out a video of the device in action, which went viral on social media.
He said after that, he started getting job offers; hopefully he then created a wooden device to help him sort all of those out.
Meanwhile, outside of the Idaho statehouse in Boise, the annual Potato Drop is taking place.
Times Square in New York may drop a glowing ball, but Idahoans ring in the new year by lowering a giant representation of a potato as fireworks light up the night sky.
This clock writes the time (Insider via YouTube)
Potato Drop ‘excited’ to be back in person to ring in 2022 (KTVB)
