A MODERN CLEPSYDRA

A timepiece in which time is measured by the regulated flow of liquid. Try to see if you can figure out what time it is by reading this timepiece!

For this project I was inspired by this clock in a mall I used to go to back home, which is the oldest mall in Kuwait. I used to sit in the main lobby as a child and stare at the sculpture for hours. Here’s a video…

Trying to figure out how to draw the water clock.

Trying to understand the spacing of drops to seconds

I started by doing a lot of research about water clocks and how they work. You can find a brief history here. I decided to take the modern approach of the scientist, Bernard Gitton’s. I used this animation to visually understand how the clock works, and I used the explanations behind the physics of the timepiece and the calculations found on this page to figure out the code necessary to simulate the water clock.

The biggest challenge was trying to understand how the seconds were working. I used an excel sheet to understand when each of the bowls need to be filled during which second, and mapped that to a 2D array matrix.