Glashütte, in Saxony, Germany, is a center of mechanical watchmaking where the designation "Glashütte/SA" is legally protected: only timepieces actually made there may bear the name. Artist Niklas Roy spent a 2026 residency there — invited by the wristwatch maker NOMOS after an unsolicited email — and built a pendulum clock almost entirely from trash and found objects: cardboard, a paint can, a rubber boot, paperclips, a plastic water bottle used as a pendulum bob, and a glass bottle for a gong. The result, the Glashütte Trash Clock, is a functioning mechanical clock that runs for about half an hour before its single driving weight is spent.
This image shows the completed clock described in the opening paragraph, illustrating the use of everyday trash materials to create a functional timepiece.
Like most mechanical pendulum clocks, it times itself with a pendulum. Roy used a "seconds pendulum" — roughly one meter long, since a pendulum's swing rate depends mainly on its length and on gravity, not on the weight of its bob. Each swing is counted and kept going by an escapement: an escapement wheel with 30 teeth meshing with an anchor and two pallets (sometimes called pallets), each swing letting the wheel advance half a tooth. With one swing per second and half a tooth released per swing, the wheel completes exactly one full turn per minute, so its axle doubles as a seconds hand. The gear teeth were cut from paperclips, the anchor from a carefully bent metal rod, and the frame from cardboard and tape.
This image shows the escapement components described in the second paragraph, highlighting how the clock's timing is regulated by a paperclip-based anchor and wheel.
To run without being pushed, the clock stores energy the way traditional pendulum clocks do: a weight suspended from a cord spooled around a barrel. In Roy's design the barrel sits on the escapement axle. The weight is a paint can filled with scrap metal he found at the NOMOS factory. He also recovered a discarded toy construction kit that contained pulleys, which he assembled into a block-and-tackle that halved the weight's travel and so roughly doubled the run time before the can reaches the floor. A second, smaller weight — a rubber boot hung from a separate string — powers the gong mechanism independently.
Displaying minutes needs a reduction drive: 60 rotations of the seconds hand should turn the minute hand once. Rather than cut precision gears, Roy used friction wheels — simple discs that can slip slightly without mattering, since the clock is not meant to be exact. Each axle rides in a hole on one side and a fork on the other, and the wheels simply lie against each other. To set the time, the minute-hand axle can be lifted slightly, disengaging it from the intermediate stage so the hand spins freely.
The audible feature is a glass bottle struck as a gong whenever the minute hand reaches 12. A cam plate on the minute wheel slowly lifts a trigger lever that carries two pins dropping into notches on a drum. That brief pause before the strike is what horologists call the "warning" — it pulls the hammer back before release. About two minutes later the lever drops off the cam, the drum spins until the first pin returns, and the hammer is freed to strike the bottle. The slow lift and sharp drop respectively make the warning tolerant and the strike moment precisely adjustable.
Having built the standard timekeeping parts, Roy added what horologists call a "complication" — any function beyond showing the time. His is a random one: a wheel of fortune labeled NOW and NEVER, mounted on a rolling scaffold in the church where he worked. As the paint-can weight descends and nearly runs out of energy, it presses a steel-wire release; a second weight at the top of the scaffold then drops and spins the wheel — a tongue-in-cheek answer to an ultimate question about time.
Despite being built from trash, the clock keeps time well. Roy taped a small black marker to the pendulum, filmed the entire run on a smartphone, and tracked the tape with a computer program. The average "second" measured 1.004 seconds (plus or minus 0.001 s), an error of about 0.4% — better than expected for a friction-wheel mechanism. The period T of an ideal pendulum is 2π√(l/g), where l is the pendulum length and g is gravity; in practice the formula only holds exactly for small swings, which is why real clocks deviate slightly as the amplitude changes.
Alongside the clock, Roy introduced a time-scale aside. Having noted that several scales — the solar-based Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), the atomic Temps Atomique International (TAI), and civil Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) — can disagree at a single instant in the same place, he declares the Glashütte Trash Clock the reference for a new scale, GTC, which blends GMT and UTC.
The project ties together Roy's family history — his great-great-grandfather Henri Roy (1833-1910) and great-grandfather Eduard Roy (1860-1942) were Swiss watchmakers who later worked in nearby Herrnhut — with Glashütte's own watchmaking heritage. Video documentation of the clock, including upright and landscape recordings, was archived on the Internet Archive in September 2026.
This image depicts the pocket watch of Niklas Roy's great-great-grandfather Henri Roy, linking the project to the family's watchmaking history mentioned in the final paragraph.