BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
Urwerk is well known for its weird and idiosyncratic wristwatches, making around 200 of them annually. Most of them use the wandering hours layout in some way, where the hours spin around the dial, and their passing nearby to a track printed on the dial indicates the elapsed minutes. Quirky stuff. Mind you, it’s not as quirky as their creation for OnlyWatch.
The Space-Time Blade is a one-off for the OnlyWatch charity auction, which is due to happen in under a month’s time, with the funds going to research into Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. Urwerk has been a proud contributor to the OnlyWatch auctions since 2011, sending some of their wildest pieces into the fray.
The Space-Time Blade may be the wildest. It’s the only electronic clock going into the auction this year, oh, and it’s 1.6m tall and weighs over 40kg. Uwerk collaborated with Czech craftsman Dalibor Farny, who has worked to revive the Nixie tube to its former glory after discovering it on the internet.
We love Nixie tubes here as well, and love this piece because of it. This one-off freestanding clock can display many things, such as the time in hours, minutes and seconds (also seconds in 1/10th or 1/100th if you wish). They can also show an indication of the number of kilometres the Earth rotates in one day, the number of kilometres around the sun it travels in one day or indeed one year.
Do you actually need one of these? No. Could you make one yourself with Arduino? Sure, there are probably loads of projects, but making one as sexy as this would be difficult.
Sadly, for now, there’s only one in existence, and experts expect it to sell for between 40,000 and 80,000 CHF. But, if it doesn’t get past 100,000 CHF, we’d be surprised.
