Over ten thousand years, performing even the most basic functions of a clock: gathering energy, keeping time, and converting it into a meaningful display, becomes interestingly complex. As The Clock’s inventor Danny Hillis considered each of these functions, a set of design principles emerged which are generally useful to consider when designing anything to last a long time:

You will see all these principles reflected throughout the design of The Clock.

The Mechanism

The Clock is entirely mechanical, made of long-lasting materials, including titanium, ceramics, quartz, sapphire, and 316 stainless steel. Even the most accurate mechanical clocks eventually drift off of the correct time, so The Clock synchronizes with the noontime sun. The Clock counts oscillations of the pendulum for day to day time, sunlight falling on the solar synchronizer to account for long-term drift, and a precomputed correction to solar time to accommodate for the orbital and rotational changes of Earth (rendered by the iconic Equation of Time Cam). Outputs include a depiction of the sky in the form of an orrery, a display of the Gregorian calendar date, and the chimes. Here’s how the pieces come together:

The Journey

A visit to The Clock begins several hours before you reach the main winder. Just reaching the entrance tunnel, situated 1,500 feet above the high scrub desert, will leave some visitors out of breath, nicked by thorns, and wondering what they got themselves into. Once you enter the underground space , you will eventually encounter a set of metal doors. These act as a kind of crude airlock, keeping out dust and wild animals. Once through the doors you head into the darkness of a long tunnel. At the end, there’s the mildest hint of light ahead that you slowly find your way to. You look up. There is a faint light filtering down to you through giant gears illuminating the beginning of a spiral staircase.

You start climbing the staircase, winding up the outer rim of the tunnel, rising toward the gears and faint light overhead. The stairs are carved out of the rock. To cut the spiral staircase, a special stone cutting robot was invented, which crept downward from the top of the shaft, grinding out a few stairs per day for nearly two years. After climbing about 100 feet, the first clock part you encounter is the driveweight of The Clock’s power system. This is a large bronze egg filled with concrete, about the size of a small car, and weighing 10,000 pounds.

After you pass the weights, you arrive at a winding station. It is a horizontal windlass or capstan, like one that might raise the anchor of an old sailing ship. It takes two or three visitors to turn the capstan easily and slowly lift its 10,000-pound weight. Together you spin the winder until the weight reaches the top of its travel beneath your feet.

You keep climbing, past a multitude of giant gears, some over 8 feet in diameter and weighing 1,000 pounds. And past those you start to see large Geneva wheels that form the chime generator. This mechanical computer uses a progressive algorithm to determine which of the millions of possible sequences the chimes will play on a given day. The chimes will not repeat for over 10,000 years. This is the world’s slowest computer.

On days when visitors are there to wind it, the calculated sequence rings each of the ten bells.

Fellow traveler and musician Brian Eno named the organization The Long Now Foundation to indicate the expanded sense of time The Clock provokes — not the short now of next quarter, next week, or the next five minutes, but the “long now” of centuries. Eno also worked with Danny Hillis on the chime generator’s progressive algorithm. His album, January 07003: Bell Studies for The Clock of the Long Now, provides a preview of the chimes that will ring inside the mountain over the millenia.

The Clock always knows the correct time, but to save energy, it won’t update its display dials unless a visitor is present to provide the necessary power. Another hand-turned wheel awaits your effort. This one winds more easily — moving display dials requires less power than ringing bells. As you wind, the calendar wheels whirr until it stops and it shows the current date and orientation to the heavens.

The timing system sits at the center of the chamber. The pendulum and escapement are encased in a shield of brass and quartz glass to keep out dust, air movements, and critters. The pendulum, which governs the timing of The Clock, is a 6-foot long titanium assembly terminating with football-sized titanium weights. It swings at a satisfyingly slow 7-second period. The slight clicks of its escapement can just be heard in the silence of the mountain.

So how does The Clock keep going if no one visits it for months, or years, or perhaps decades to wind it? A pathway continues up to the outside summit of the mountain and you can see the answer. That faint light seen from the bottom has resolved into a 12 foot cupola with a sapphire glass window covering the top of the shaft. This and a partially buried cylinder are the only parts of the clock visible from the outside. Sunlight enters the cupola and is focused down into the solar synchronizer, heating up a chamber of air which can be harvested as a mechanical signal for solar noon. This signal is adjusted by the Equation of Time Cam, which accounts for the +/- 15 minute difference of solar-to-absolute-time due to the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit (and a few other slow effects like the precessional cycle and rotational speed).

Thermal power has been used for small mantel clocks before, but it has not been done before at this scale. As long as the sun shines and night comes, The Clock can keep time by itself, but it can’t ring its chimes for long or show the time it knows without visitors.

There is more than just technology in the mountain. The ticks of time are a very human invention. Astronomical calendars are among the first relics of culture, and often the mark of civilizations. The Clock in the mountain not only plays the music of an ever-changing slow melody, but it will collect cultural expressions of time, ticks to mark the passage of decades and centuries. Off to the side of the main cavern of The Clock are a series of small niches to explore and collect these notices of time. Their contents will be a surprise.

The journey to The Clock in the mountain ends on the summit in light. It is the sun that powers its ringing below. Like a heart beating while we sleep, The Clock in the mountain keeps time even when we pretend the past did not happen and the future will not come.

The Challenge

Almost any kind of artifact can last 10 millennia if stored and cared for properly. We have examples of 5,000-year-old wood staves, papyrus, and leather sandals. On the other hand, modern metal can corrode in a few years of salt and rain. For longevity, the environment is often more important than material. The mountain top in Texas is a high dry desert, and in The Clock shaft below, the temperature is a stable 55 degrees fahrenheit regardless of time or season. This avoids freeze and thaw cycles, which can be as corrosive as water. It’s an ideal world for a ceaseless Clock.

Still, The Clock is a machine with moving parts, and parts wear down and lubricants evaporate or corrode. Most of The Clock will be made in a marine grade 316 stainless steel. One of the main worries of the Clockmakers is that elements of a 10,000 year Clock — by definition — will move slowly. The millennial dial creeps so slowly it can be said to not move at all during your lifetime. Metals in contact with each other over those time scales can fuse — defeating the whole purpose of an ongoing timepiece. Dissimilar metals in contact can eat each other in galvanic corrosion. To counteract these tendencies, all of The Clock’s bearings are ceramic.

Ceramics will outlast most metals as they can be diamond hard and do not corrode or rust. We have found shards of clay pots over 17,000 years old. Because these engineered ceramic bearings are so hard, and rotate at very low speed, they require no grit-attracting lubrication.

The biggest problem for the beating Clock will be the effects of its human visitors. Over the span of centuries, valuable stuff of any type tends to be stolen, kids climb everywhere, and hackers naturally try to see how things work or break. But it is humans that keep The Clock’s bells wound up, and humans who ask it the time. The Clock needs us. It will be a long, out of the way journey to get inside The Clock ringing inside a mountain. But as long as The Clock ticks, it keeps asking us, in whispers of buried bells, “Are we being good ancestors?”