Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » Kircher’s Magnetic Clock

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April 19th, 2006

Kircher’s Magnetic Clock

Not long ago, Stanford University reconstructed Athanasius Kircher’s famous magnetic clock:

In the third chapter of the second book of his 1641 Magnes, sive de arte Magnetica, Athanasius Kircher unveiled at last the secret mechanism of Line’s magnetic clock, confirming once and for all, in spite of the earlier hopes of Peiresc, that it could not be used to demonstrate the condemned Copernican hypothesis of the motion of the earth.

The clock was operated by means of a trick: the falling level of a water-clock, or “clepsydra”, hidden in the base of the machine caused a cylinder to rotate slowly. A strong magnet fixed to the top of the cylinder caused a second magnet, situated inside the copper globe suspended at the centre of the glass sphere, to follow its rotation. A stationary fish points to the hour markings on the rotating copper globe to give the time. Kircher claims to have calibrated his device so that the cylinder would rotate once every twenty-four hours, although the water-clock would probably have required frequent refilling.

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