Corpus Clock

The Corpus Clock stands on the Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, a gold-plated disc at street level where Bene’t Street meets Trumpington Street. It looks out over King’s Parade, a busy Cambridge thoroughfare, and was funded by John Taylor, an alumnus and honorary fellow of the college. The clock was unveiled in 2008 by physicist Stephen Hawking and named one of Time’s Best Inventions that year. Its face has no hands or numerals, only slits lit by blue LEDs that open to show hours, minutes and seconds. A metal grasshopper called the Chronophage moves its jaws as if eating time, blinking occasionally and grinding audibly. A Latin inscription below quotes the Vulgate: ‘The world passeth away, and the lust thereof.’ The clock is accurate only once every five minutes, its irregular motion meant to reflect life’s unpredictability. Visitors see the rippling gold disc and the Chronophage’s slow, deliberate chewing of seconds. The mechanism is fully mechanical, wound by a small motor and lit by LEDs, with a pendulum that halts briefly at random intervals. The escapement, a homage to John Harrison’s eighteenth-century design, dominates the clock’s outward form. A chain clanks into a tiny wooden coffin to mark the hour, while the whole structure sits in what was once a 19th-century bank entrance.