When we glance at our phones or wristwatches, we assume time is a universal, unchanging rhythm. Yet throughout history and even today, inventors have dreamed up some truly bizarre clocks and alternative time systems that turn that assumption on its head.
Why Bizarre Clocks Capture Our Imagination
From solving demographic dilemmas to redefining the very length of a second, these oddball creations show how culture, politics, and pure curiosity can reshape how we measure minutes and hours.
10 Japan’s Sex Clock
Japan faces a looming demographic crunch: couples are so absorbed by work that the national birth rate is slipping, leaving the country with a growing retiree population and fewer children. Economists at Tohoku University turned this crisis into a clock.
They built an online “Sex Clock” that projects when Japan might be reduced to a single child, based on current birth‑rate trends. The calculator points to the year 3776 as the moment when only one child would remain.
While that date lies far in the future, the clock serves as a stark reminder that even the most futuristic societies can be humbled by simple biology.
9 French Decimal Time
In the wake of the French Revolution, reformers tried to rationalise everything—including time. Their decimal time divided the day into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. Noon sat at 5:00, midnight at 10:00.
The system was meant to sync with the revolutionary calendar and strip away religious influence, but the sheer magnitude of the shift proved too jarring for the public. After just six months, France abandoned the experiment and returned to the familiar 24‑hour day.
8 Swatch .Beat Time
Swiss watchmaker Swatch once tried to erase time zones altogether with .beat time. The idea was to count time in “beats” where one day equals 1000 beats, each beat lasting 86.4 seconds. Greenwich Mean Time was replaced by Biel Mean Time (BMT), named after Swatch’s hometown.
Although CNN and Ericsson briefly adopted the system, its mathematical quirks and the illegal use of radio frequencies for synchronization kept it from ever catching on. Swatch still hosts a .beat converter for the curious.
7 Horologium Florae
The flower clock, or horologium florae, relies on the natural opening and closing of aequinoctial flowers to signal the hour. By planting several species side by side, each blooming at a different time, a garden can become a living timepiece.
Botanist Carl Linnaeus proposed the concept, though he likely never built one himself. Nevertheless, hobbyists have crafted their own floral chronometers, turning gardens into whimsical clocks.
6 Time Of Ave Maria
Italy once measured time with a single counter‑clockwise hand on a 24‑hour dial. The final hour didn’t end at midnight; it concluded at sunset, marking the start of a new day. This “Ave Maria” system let people instantly see how many hours remained until dusk.
Because the length of daylight changes with the seasons, the clock required frequent adjustments. Napoleon eventually outlawed the practice in the 18th century, favoring the universal 24‑hour clock.
5 Hexclock
Mark Rogers introduced the Hexclock in 1997, swapping the traditional 24‑hour day for a 16‑hour cycle that runs from 0‑9 then A‑F. Hours, minutes, and seconds are separated by underscores instead of colons—noon reads “8_00_0,” midnight “F_00_0.”
The design promises straightforward conversions: moving a digit rightward across an underscore automatically shifts it from seconds to minutes, minutes to hours, and so on. Rogers built prototypes, but a mass‑produced version never materialised.
4 Ke Time
Ancient China and Japan once counted the day in “ke,” a unit equal to 14.4 minutes. A full day comprised 100 ke, though emperors could tweak the system—some started the count at 11 p.m. the previous night, others at midnight, and a few even introduced “double hours.”
Each ke could be subdivided into fens, whose exact length varied with each ruler’s whim. Eventually, the region settled on the familiar 24‑hour, 60‑minute framework.
3 Water Clock
Ancient Egyptians needed precise timing for rituals, so they built water clocks for night‑time use. A basin with twelve marked levels held water that slowly drained through a tiny aperture; the descending water line indicated the passing hour.
Invented by a court clerk named Amenemhat, the device also doubled as a courtroom timer, measuring how long litigants could speak before the water reached the next mark.
2 FFF
The furlong‑firkin‑fortnight (FFF) system began as a tongue‑in‑cheek proposal among computer scientists. A fortnight equals two weeks (1,209,600 seconds), a furlong is 220 yards, and a firkin is nine gallons. Speed measured in furlongs per fortnight translates to roughly one centimeter per minute.
While largely a joke, the concept has found a niche in some operating systems that use “micro‑fortnights” as a placeholder for an unset system clock.
1 Tonal Time
John Nystrom’s Tonal Time also embraced a 16‑hour day, but he went further by inventing six new numerals to fill the gaps after 9. In this system, hours split into 16 “timtons,” and minutes into 16 “timsans.” The number 9 was renamed “me,” and the topmost hour, 16, became “ton.”
Noon therefore reads “me tims,” while midnight is “ton tims.” Tonal Time even featured its own 16‑month calendar, offering a complete alternative to the Gregorian system.