Analog Clocks, the Dummy Version

Analog clock gears

Except for the short-lived fad a couple of years ago that found millennial males wearing (and even collecting) oversized wrist watches, many youngsters have rarely seen a clock with moving hands; what's known in the trade as an analog clock. That's as opposed to a digital display. That could be because they so infrequently look up from their phones... However, someone once wondered to Google, "How do Analog Clocks Work?"¹ That's a good question... unfortunately, eHow freelancer Victor Fonseca tried to answer it for Sciencing.com, and failed. Miserably.

Fonseca's "answer," such as it is, comprises three paragraphs and 350 words. In short, according to Victor, analog clocks may be "a wheel driven by a nearby body of water"; "a rope and pulley clock, with each hour resetting a massive weight that strikes the bells"; or "oscillating mechanisms... powered by a variety of sources [including] direct electrical currents or batteries."

Well excuse us, Vic, but that's the equivalent of saying "gasoline" when someone asks "How do internal combustion engines work?" Oh, Fonseca flirts briefly with the real answer in his second paragraph, where he wrote the nonsense statement, "...its synchronized gears would help set the precedence for the oscillatory clocks of today..." ...but he immediately dropped the ball and went on to display his usual unfamiliarity with all things technical (should've taken a science class or two while getting that PolySci degree, Vic).

The answer is pretty simple, but you'll need to understand what "gears" are; and we're pretty sure Fonseca doesn't understand them. No, an analog clock has some sort of power – spring, quartz crystal, pendulum, electricity – that turns the hands. Those hands are on geared shafts that turn at set rates relative to each other: the second hand turns sixty times for each revolution of the minute hand, etc. Spring- and pendulum-powered clocks have escapements that regulate the motion of the hands. An analog clock is a marvel of precision machining.

To Fonseca, however, it's a black box he relegates to pseudo-flowery writing and semi-historical blather. Victor's post lacks all but the most tangential relation to the answer sought by the OQ, which is plenty of reason to award him yet another Dumbass of the Day award – his fifth.

¹ The original has been sent to the cleanup team by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   ehow.com/how-does_4912745_analog-clocks-work.html

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