While I was spending time in my grandmother’s garage on Sunday, I occupied myself by browsing through the assorted stuff that will accumulate over time in any garage. I found a “Travel Alarm Clock” that presumably belonged to my grandfather, it’s a manual wind-up clock with day/date indicator and an alarm bell (An actual bell).
One of these bad boys:
I decided to see if I could get it going again and while fiddling with the dials the alarm began ringing. I hadn’t wound it up yet, it had been wound all along.
My grandfather passed almost eight years ago, and he almost certainly didn’t use this for years (Or even decades) beforehand. My grandparents upgraded their clocks and timepieces over the years and had long since switched to electronic clocks and even cell-phones for portable timepieces. Yet this old wind-up bell kept its wires taught and had enough constrained energy to work.
That means something.
