Mystery clocks and projection clocks

Roger Russell, who is known among hi-fi enthusiasts as the former director of acoustic research at McIntosh Laboratory, is also fascinated by curious clocks. Specifically, Russell created Web pages about "mystery clocks," in which the hands seem to be suspended without any obvious driving mechanism, and "projection clocks," that surprisingly date back to the early 1900s. When I shared a bedroom with my big brother as a kid, I sometimes suffered from insomnia and would occasionally wake him to complain about it. He threatened to buy a projection clock for our room so I could stare at the ceiling all night and watch the minutes... tick... by....

Mystery Clock History Page

Projection Clock Page

• [Anonymous]

  You had a very patient older brother. If my younger brother woke me up to complain that HE couldn’t sleep he would not have survived childhood.

• [Wickedashtray]

  I had that exact projection clock pictured when I was but a wee lad.

• [MacBookHeir]

  My late dad always used to say “A watched clock never ticks”

• [jackdavinci]

  I had a nifty clock that projected giant hands onto my wall. Then one day a spider got into it. It projected an enormous terrifying spider shadow onto my wall and nearly gave me a heart attack.