Myriad Year Clock
Tanaka Hisashige (1799 to 1881) · 1851
A glass dome the size of a large lantern holds a clock with six faces, crowned by a little model of the sun and moon that circle over a map of Japan. One face is a Western clock, one shows the traditional Japanese hours that changed length with the seasons, and the others show the day of the week, the phase of the moon, the twenty four solar terms of the old calendar and the Chinese zodiac. All of it runs from a single winding that was meant to last a year. It is the most complicated clock ever made in Edo period Japan, and it was made by one man.
Tanaka Hisashige was a craftsman from Kurume in Kyushu who was famous for mechanical dolls before he turned to clocks. He finished the Myriad Year Clock in 1851, working almost entirely with hand tools and calculating the gearing himself. Look at the Japanese dial: the hours were unequal, six in the day and six in the night whatever the season, so Tanaka designed a mechanism that automatically moved the hour markers along the dial as the year turned, a problem that had defeated every earlier clockmaker. The cloisonné faces and the lacquered case show that he was an artist as well as an engineer.
Tanaka went on to build steam engines and telegraphs for the new Meiji government, and the workshop he founded in Tokyo became the company now called Toshiba. The clock was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2006, and a team of modern engineers who took it apart to make a replica for the Aichi Expo in 2005 found that they could not reproduce some of its parts without computer controlled machines.
Did You Know? The clock's maker founded the workshop that became Toshiba, and modern engineers who built a replica in 2005 struggled to match his hand cut gears.
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