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

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April 19th, 2006

Kircher’s Sunflower Clock

In addition to the magnetic clock, Kircher was also responsible for another, perhaps even cooler, timekeeping device. From the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s exhibit on Kircher:

To illustrate his belief in the magnetic relationship between the sun and the vegetable kingdom, Kircher designed this heliotropic sunflower clock by attaching a sunflower to a cork and floating it in a reservoir of water. As the blossom rotated to face the sun, a pointer through its center indicated the time on the inner side of a suspended ring. Kircher claimed that it didn’t work well because enclosing it in a glass case would block the sun’s attractive force, and that it was ‘therefore susceptible to inaccuracies due to the wind’. Further, “when the sunlight was weak, and itself was as if withered and worn out, it ran slow, seeking rest.”

The clock is described in Instruments and the Imagination, by Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman.

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