Useless trivia from museums #1 - Oxford Museum of Science

Sat, 24 May 2003 13:57:00 -0400
/misc

The Oxford Museum of Science currently have a “Horological Masterworks” exhibition from which I learnt about Roman Striking clocks.

These are ingenious devices which can produce 3 different sounds, each sound representing X, V or I. This allows the clock to chime the hour in Roman Numerals. They can be visually identified because they use IV as 4 instead of the near universal (for clocks) IIII.