an irrational fondness for outdated technology

I must confess to an irrational fondness for outdated technology.

I was recently in the market for a new alarm clock. So I went to John Lewis, which sells slightly more attractive, considerably more expensive versions of things that everyone uses. The cutest alarm clock by a long margin was the Karlsson Mini Binky, so I got a little black one. It was clockwork, and had the cutest wee face you have ever seen. This thing was cuter than a day old puppy. It fitted perfectly into the hand, with the heft of a cricket ball. It ticked away reassuringly all night long. A fine tick that you could fall asleep to.

But on fully winding it, it would only run for about twelve hours. After twelve hours it would either stop altogether or stop for a wee while. On checking the Amazon reviews here, and in the USA (who knew that there was no Amazon in Australia or New Zealand?) these problems seem common. So regretfully I had to take the clock back, inordinately fond as I was, of this day old puppy that was starting to crap on my carpet.

The clock was made in China, and browsing the other clockwork clocks you can still buy, they equally seem to be made in China these days and are equally prone to similarly mixed reviews.

How is it that China can make an iPhone knock off in about twelve minutes, but when it comes to replicating technology that is centuries old, they fall down miserably. It is not as if these Chinese clockwork clocks are cheap, or as if clockwork technology is impossibly difficult.

When I grew up there were big factories in Scotland making clockwork alarm clocks, the hideous Westclocks {?}. But now, no one apart from the Chinese makes clockwork clocks.

In my lifetime it is a technology that has gone from ubiquity to a historic curio. It is a pet peeve of my to go somewhere, and see a fine old clockwork clock, that is not ticking. I love to be surrounded by the ticking of clocks. I like their slightly impressionistic approach to timekeeping. I like that you come home to an empty house after a week and all the clocks have stopped ticking, so you take five minutes to wind them all. I like that each week I take the brass key and wind up the hanging clock on my wall.

I was going to call this blog posting, "why don't Chinese people get clockwork".

But there are a lot of Chinese, you would be foolish to bet against them. For now they are producing things to our specifications. But while English uses an alphabet of 26 characters, Chinese uses an alphabet of over three hundred. A computer key board makes sense with 26 characters, in effect you have almost that many fingers, a piano keyboard has that sort of number of keys. There is an inherent ease to keyboard input for that sort of level of differentiation.

But Chinese has over 300 characters. If the Chinese had invented the computer, they certainly would not have invented the keyboard as we know it. You can certainly use a computer in Chinese, scrolling through to select the correct character. But starting from scratch that is now how you would input to a computer if you were designing a method of input for over three hundred characters.

Similarly the paradigm with a computer is that one you have entered a character, you move on from the space never to return. You cannot overlay one character upon another. You could with an old manual type writer, you probably would want to for transcribing Chinese.

And Chinese is a tonal language, unlike ours. Chinese medicine operates to different paradigms. For the moment the Chinese are building things to our specifications.

But all those factories in Scotland that made alarm clocks in my youth, are gone now, what else is going to be different forty years from now. You should never bet against the Chinese, and you should never bet against change.