New York: Billionaire Jeff Bezos has paid Rs 350 crore, or $42 million, to develop a clock that will only tick once a year and survive 10,000 years.
Designed by computer scientist and inventor Danny Hillis, the 500-foot-tall clock is located inside a Texas mountain, according to Fox News.
The 10,000-year clock with a solar synchroniser, a pendulum, a chime generator, and a series of gears and dials, uses the Earth’s thermal cycles to power itself.
The Clock is engineered to require minimal maintenance and is powered by mechanical energy harvested from sunlight as well as the people who visit it. It is entirely mechanical, and made of long-lasting materials, including titanium, ceramics, quartz, sapphire, and 316 stainless steel.
It will mark time with astronomic and calendric displays and a chime generator that can produce over 3.5 million unique bell chime sequences -- one for every day the Clock is visited for the next 10,000 years.
The clock also has five room-sized anniversary chambers, one for each of the first, 10th, 100th, 1,000th and 10,000th-year anniversaries. The chambers are sealed spaces for time-related artefacts and messages about humanity's future, the report said.
The first chamber will contain a model of the solar system and the others will be left for future generations to fill.
Work on the clock continues, and no completion date has been set. It is currently being built by the Long Now Foundation and is called "The Clock of the Long Now".
The foundation said the "monument scale mechanical clock" is designed to keep accurate time for the next ten millennia.
But to save energy, it won’t update its display dials unless a visitor is present to provide the necessary power.
"To see The Clock you need to start at dawn, like any pilgrimage. It will require a day’s hike to reach its interior gears,” according to the foundation's website,
The clock will be free to visit, but the number of visitors will be limited to preserve the integrity and the mystery of the clock, the report said.
With inputs from IANS