These digital clocks aren't digital at all

It's time... for a simpler video. Look, time is a precious commodity for me right now. There's a lot going on at once for me right now and the timing hasn't been the best. In times like these, I've found that talking about watches works most of the time. Anyway, let's not waste time and move on. TIC Tac. As I'm sure you've gathered from the thumbnail and the words below, this video is about these watches. Are they still popular? I think so. But now that I think about it, maybe not so much anymore. I mean, they're not the default Android wallpaper anymore, like... on all of them.

Anyway, it doesn't matter because I like them. And while aesthetics are the main reason I like them, the second reason is how they work. These watches are much simpler than they seem at first glance, but very smart. To understand them, we will first need to learn about latent heat and the refrigeration cycle. Kidding! Haha, got you there. I sure am a stinker. But here's the thing: once you know how these watches work? You will flip! Folding watches like these are

digital

watches, but they are not

digital

watches at all either. Sometimes called analog watches with digital displays, they have a lot more in common with a regular watch like this than with a digital watch like that.

All this is actually a 24-hour clock with strange hands. I was hoping you'd stop by at eight o'clock right there. Come on! Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Do it. Here we go. First attempt! Have a look. Here is a normal watch. He has two hands! Some even have a third hand which we call "the second." It's great. But for now all we care about are the hour and minute hands. Now, the job of any watch like this is to move the hands slowly and deliberately. How that is accomplished is not important at this point, but the minute hand makes one revolution every hour and a bit of gearing slows it down by a factor of 12, so the hour hand makes one revolution every 12 hours.

Notice that the hands are stacked. The minute hand is in front of the hour hand. It has to be that way for the gear to work, and that's really convenient for a rotating watch. Look, imagine if the clock's hands were... thick. The minute hand could be extended outwards and the hour hand inwards. Now imagine that instead of hands there were drums. And now imagine that the clock is rotated so that the edges of the drums are visible. Now we're getting somewhere! We now have two drums, one of which rotates once every hour and the other once every twelve.

Oh, but I'd like an AM/PM indicator please (or maybe 24 hours if that's your problem), so let's make one of them take a full day to complete. What have we achieved? Well, we could print the numbers 00 to 59 on one of the drums, then the hours on the other and have some kind of display window. But that would be really silly and would require a huge watch to read from a distance. To be clear, watches that used three drums, as seen in this incredibly convenient footage, existed, but today we're talking about the flippy type. What if, instead, we loosely placed a series of cards on the drums and held them that way?

Like a Rolodex! Some of you know what they are. Place the cards so that they can rotate at least 180 degrees, and by holding the edge of one of them so that it is vertical, the adjacent card will hang down and its edges will meet in the center. Print numbers on these cards so that the numbers span two of them and you have created a numerical display. Speaking of screens, some of you might be thinking about the classic split screen on train station and airport departure boards of yesterday, the FastPass checkout and return

clocks

of yesterday, or that new one you can buy that's connected to the cloud because of course.

I say this sarcastically, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't want it. This is, at a really low level, the same type of technology, but those screens are usually alphanumeric and sometimes even more complicated than that. And they have a much deeper mechanics and control circuit. The way they display things is the same, but the technology behind them is much more complicated. I would like to talk about them someday, but that day is not today. Today is this, and this is just a watch. Anyway, as a drum... well, actually it's more like a wheel now.

As the wheel is turned, the card held up is slowly pulled down. The little latch that holds it doesn't move with the card, so eventually the card currently in front slides past your pinky finger and... flips over! The next card is revealed. Look from the side and you can see how the cards intermingle. That latch is placed in a line roughly tangential to the front edge of the wheel, which not only ensures that the two visible cards stand proudly in front, but also causes future and ongoing cards to stack up neatly. As they make their way around the back, they turn upside down and pile up once more, waiting for their minute of fame.

And that's all that's going on here! This wheel works just like the minute hand on a normal watch. It just spins slowly, making one full rotation every hour. It becomes a digital clock simply by creating a bottleneck using this closure, forcing the cards to be grouped on top and displayed one at a time. When accelerated, you can see how the exposed face appears to continually move downwards. That's effectively what happens when we look at the front edge of a spinning wheel and the space between two cards is on the surface of the wheel itself. So naturally, the other side of the clock is just the hour hand!

But two special things happen here. One is that it is geared at a ratio of 1:24 to the other wheel, so it spins once a day. But with only 24 cards, that would leave a big gap between them and therefore a lot more of the next card would be seen. You can always see a little bit of the next card, and 24 isn't enough to cover it without seeing some of the actual text. That would be ugly. So instead, there are 48 cards. Each hour has two cards so that the next card is covered more completely. You can see, if you look closely, that on the hour side you can see a little more of the next card than on the minutes.

And with only 24 cards that gap would be double. You might think, then, that those time cards flip at the end and beginning of the hour, but you'd be wrong! In reality, they change between twenty and fifty minutes after the hour. This may seem silly. After all, if you changed it to 50 minutes, the clock would go from saying 11:50 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. m. at 12:51 p.m. m. and that is not good, in fact, completely unacceptable! It's just not up to par! Inappropriate! Etc. However, that is exactly what the time card does. But there is a problem.

Look, we just don't have the precision to make the time card rotate at exactly the right time with the transition from 59 minutes to 00 using a normal clock movement. At least not by itself. In fact, the hour cards are deliberately misaligned with the minute cards so that they flip over too soon, and a clever little latch of the second prevents the second hour card from revealing the next one until the minute card 59 has turned. Take a look, here is the clock showing mmhm:55. In reality, the time card has already escaped initial capture, but this little finger is holding it back once again.

After about 40 minutes you can see that the finger begins to move. Integrated into the minute wheel is a small ramp. As the wheel rotates, it pushes this piece which connects to the latch using a push rod. Once it is in place, the second hour card cannot be left out of reach. At some somewhat random point around the fifty minute mark it will drop from the main catch and you can actually see it leaning forward slightly once it does, but it doesn't really matter when the second card drops, as long as whenever later. that latch has been moved into position.

As we get closer to the 59 minute mark, you'll see that the ramp is no longer pressing on the closure. Instead, it hands that duty over to this little flag bump on card 59 itself. When we get to 59, that's the only thing that pushes the latch to the left. Then, once card 59 drops, the capture is released, so the time card also drops revealing the next time at the same time 00 is revealed. This not only ensures successful synchronization, but also reduces the need to go overboard with precision manufacturing. As long as the time card is flipped after the latch has been moved but before it is released, it is fine, and that gives about a 20 minute margin of error in the alignment between the two wheels.

Isn't this the coolest idea you've ever heard? That's hyperbole, yes, but this is really just the guts of a run-of-the-mill analog clock sandwiched between two very strange hands with a bit of supporting hardware. The main difference between these watches and something like this is that they have motors that move continuously, rather than the stepped movement typical of quartz watches. That means they don't tick, they just vibrate a little and click every minute. Some folding watches have typical ticking movements, for what it's worth. It's unclear if these have an actual quartz movement, but these two keep decent time, so I think that's probably the case.

However, these large watches use D cells, so I imagine the motor is larger than what you'd find in a smooth second-hand quartz watch, which, by the way, exist. Does anyone know what I'm talking about here? Nevermind, new paragraph! \However, this style of watch is not without its weaknesses. Even assuming you have a watch that keeps perfect time for a day, each minute change will be a little off. The way the watch works and its imprecise manufacturing means that the time between turns is somewhat random and never exactly one minute. I mean, not *that* random, but put a seconds reference next to one and you'll see that it's not exactly consistent when flipped.

This also means that if you're the type of person who hates having multiple

clocks

in the same room that don't show exactly the same time (like me), you won't want to display a collection of these together. They will never stay in sync. Perhaps its most serious drawback is that the mechanism is unidirectional. To set the time you can only go forward, which means that in the fall, when we do that with clocks, you need to advance it 23 hours (which is quite a task) or remove the battery for an hour. and do your best to remember to put it back.

And even just setting them up from the beginning is annoying. It is usually necessary to exceed the actual time by one minute because the mechanism will recoil slightly when you release it. For the type of person who can't stand clocks being more than a few seconds off (like me), that's not ideal. But I love the way they look, so I'll put up with it. These new watches are, of course, a retro revival of something old. The folding watch has been around for many decades, but from what I can tell, running on batteries is a fairly new implementation.

Previously they ran on AC power and used a synchronous motor to keep time. It's actually a fantastic time reference, at least between power outages. Let me show you one. Is it Sonny and Cher? This Panasonic alarm clock is a folding clock. It's the only thrift store folding watch I still have, but like all the ones I've found, it has a design on a little wheel that's attached to the motor so you can tell if it's actually working. Intelligent. It also had a small light on the dial so you could see it in the dark. Intelligent. (unfortunately it is burned out) And it is also not fundamentally different from normal old analog watches, not even in the alarm function.

Do you know that many basic alarm clocks have a third (or fourth) hand that you use to set the alarm? This is exactly the same thing, but instead of a hand, it's this little wheel indicator. You set the alarm for the time you want, and somewhere deep in this mechanism is a switch that activates when the displayed time and the set time match. Why do I mention this? Because Groundhog Day presents this alarm as if it goes off at exactly 6:00 a.m. m. and that's not how it works! The actual time you set this alarm to go off is simply a suggestion.

Yes, there are discrete clicks when you turn this wheel and that might make you think there is some precision to this mechanism, but no. There is no precision and it will probably ring at least five minutes earlier than you actually set it to. It's like no matter how straight you try to point the alarm hand on a clock like this, the time displayed will almost never match exactly when the alarm goes off. The mechanism here is simply not tied to when the numbers change, it will simply activate when it decidesdo it. Groundhog Day blatantly misrepresents this alarm clock!

This is the kind of cinematic pedantry I live by. So of course I ran a test to find out exactly when this alarm would go off if it were set to 6:00 and at least here it was remarkably close. Just a few seconds before. Now, I used to use this alarm clock every morning and I wrote the script based on my memories of that time, and it's fair to say I was exaggerating the inaccuracy here, but the point remains that the cards are flipped regardless of the actual alarm mechanism. That little tidbit can stick in your brain and bother you every time you watch Groundhog Day like it does me.

You are welcome! So why did Groundhog Day do it that way? Well, almost certainly because someone on the production team realized that making the alarm go off at 5:56 would annoy a lot more people who don't know the intricacies of how these clocks work than it would annoy insufferable nerds like me, who yes we know. . Or maybe even more likely... it's just much more satisfying and artistic license was taken. The clock we see on screen is actually a prop clock built for the film. Look, by 1993 alarm clocks like this were already out of fashion and this model was almost certainly chosen deliberately to reinforce the "tacky and old-fashioned" nature of the hotel.

But, setting these clocks, as we have established, is a real hassle. Especially since you can't go back after a missed shot. So, to facilitate production, a special clock was built that moves back and forth between 5:59 and 6:00 on cue. In fact, you can see here that the card behind the 00 is another 59. That's definitely not the top of one. Another clue is that everything shakes when the cards are turned over and that's just not right. This is what it really looks like. But anyway, that's it! It's time to go. I quite like these watches and today there are several affordable options in various styles.

I will say that from my experience you probably want to avoid this cheap one. I've had two at various times over the years (it seems the factory that produces them has been in operation for over a decade) and they both failed within just a couple of months. This model has a radically different mechanism than these and the time cards actually move forward like the groundhog's prop clock. The two watches I bought stopped turning time. Which was a bummer. This is actually the exact second model I purchased and both work perfectly (I gave the other one away).

This model appears to have the exact same mechanism and has worked well for over five years. I just bought this one. This is in no way a Victrola. I wish that mark wasn't there. And it works fine too, but when I received it, card 43 was installed incorrectly and caused some binding of adjacent numbers. Fortunately, it was easy to fix by simply removing and reinserting that card. Oh, and I'll leave you with another clockwork pedantry. These watches? When they get stopped, it's only okay once a day. Think about that, idiom writers! ♫ punctually smooth jazz ♫ And although aesthetics are the main reason I like them, a close second is the faaaaa Look, we….

Look, we just. Look, we just... we don't have the be deh de buh. And a clever second capture prevents the second hour card from revealing the next until the BLEUH card... reveals the next... This is a very clumsy and very long sentence. To understand them, we will first need to learn about latent heat and the refrigeration cycle. I knew it would break me! Ughhhh... ...first we'll have to learn about latent heat and the refrigeration cycle. There's no way I'm going to top that! So what did you think? Isn't what the Groundhog Day production team did a scandal?

Misleading millions of people about how clock radios that use Flip technology work? The damage to our society is incalculable.