The Water Clock

by Edward Lorenz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The clock was meant to keep time, and on the Monday it did.

Della Hostetler had built it in her garage in the two weeks before the fair, for the Grange's educational table, because the Grange had asked the high school for an exhibit and the high school had asked her. She taught general science and the ninth-grade algebra section nobody else wanted. Her first idea had been a hygrometer made from a human hair, and she had given it up when she saw how slowly it moved. A thing on a table at a fair has to be seen to work by people who will look at it for perhaps twenty seconds.

So she had taken the front wheel off her son's old bicycle, a twenty-six-inch wheel with most of its spokes, and set its axle across the top of a sawhorse frame so that it hung upright and turned freely. Around the rim she hung twelve evaporated-milk cans on loops of baling wire, one at every second spoke, so that each can swung level, like the cars on a Ferris wheel. In the bottom of each can she had driven a sixpenny nail and pulled it out again. A garden hose, clamped to a board above the wheel, ran into whichever can happened to be at the top. A galvanized washtub underneath caught what came out of the holes.

The principle was the old one. The can at the top fills faster than it drains and becomes heavy, the wheel turns to bring it down, the next can comes under the hose, and so on. Behind the wheel she had nailed a square of beaverboard painted white, with the twelve hours lettered round its edge, and the valve stem of the tire served as the hand. Across the top of the board, in red barn paint, Dale had lettered WATER KEEPS TIME. He had left too little room for the last word and it ran down the side.

She had adjusted it in the garage for most of a Saturday afternoon. With the tap at the hall opened a little more than half a turn, the wheel went round once in a little over four minutes, always westward, which was to say away from the door. She had timed it with a quart Mason jar under the hose and her kitchen timer: forty seconds to fill the jar. She made a mark on the tap handle with nail varnish so that the setting could be found again.

On the Monday, the first day of the fair, it went round once in four minutes and ten seconds, and once in four minutes and eight seconds, and once in four minutes and eleven seconds. A number of people looked at it for perhaps twenty seconds. One man asked whether the water came from the county or from a well. Mrs. Kinsinger from the fair board said it was very clever and asked whether it could be made to go faster, since it was hard to tell that it was going at all.

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On the Tuesday morning Della had to be at the school for an hour to see to the registration of the new ninth grade, and she left Dale in charge of the table. He was thirteen and had helped to build the thing and could be trusted to empty the washtub.

When she came back to the Grange hall a little after eleven there were about twenty people standing around the table, which was more than had stood there all of the previous day. The wheel was turning eastward, towards the door. As she came up it slowed and nearly stopped, with the valve stem near four o'clock, and hung there while the top can filled, and then began, quite slowly, to turn back the way it had come. Somebody in the crowd said, "There," and somebody else laughed.

"Mrs. Kinsinger said to make it go faster," Dale said.

She looked at the tap. The nail-varnish mark was a quarter of a turn to the left of where it had been. She went and got the Mason jar from under the table and held it under the hose and counted. The jar filled in twenty-six seconds.

She watched the wheel for some time without saying anything. It went westward for three turns and a little more, slowing on each, then stopped and went eastward for less than one turn, then westward again for two. The reversals did not come at any particular place on the dial. They did not come at any particular interval. Once the wheel spun quite fast, faster than it had ever gone in the garage, for nearly a minute, and then braked itself and reversed so abruptly that two of the cans swung up on their wires and slopped water across the floor.

It was not hard to see why, in a general way. If the wheel was turning fast, each can passed under the hose too quickly to take on much water, and the heavy cans were the ones that had filled earlier and had already gone some way round and down on the far side. Enough of that and the heavy side of the wheel was the side that was going up, and the wheel slowed, and stopped, and went back. At forty seconds a quart there was not enough water to get the wheel turning fast enough for any of that to happen. At twenty-six seconds a quart there was.

What was hard to see was why it did it when it did and not some other time.

"Should I put it back?" Dale said.

She said she didn't think so. Not yet.

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The man who began calling the reversals was standing at the front of the crowd when she came back from her dinner that afternoon. He was perhaps seventy, in a gray suit that was too warm for August, with a watch chain across the vest, and he had his hands behind his back. She knew him to look at. His name was Lyle Bauman and he had been a train dispatcher for the Pennsylvania Railroad at Crestline for most of his life, and he had come back to live in the county when he retired, in his sister's house on the Wooster road.

He would watch the wheel without moving for a minute or more, and then he would say, not loudly, "East," and in a few seconds the wheel would slow and stop and turn east. Or he would say "Not yet," while somebody beside him was saying the wheel was about to go, and it would not go.

The boys at the back of the crowd had already started making small bets with each other, in pennies, on which way it would be turning when the minute hand of the hall clock reached the hour. When Mr. Bauman called a reversal correctly they looked at him the way they might have looked at a man who could tell the color of a playing card through its back.

Della brought the small blackboard from her classroom the next morning, the one on the folding easel, and set it up beside the table. She ruled two columns and wrote CALLED at the top of one and CAME at the top of the other, and when Mr. Bauman arrived at ten o'clock and took his place she asked him whether he minded if she kept the score.

He looked at the blackboard for a moment. "Put down how far ahead I called it," he said. "Otherwise it doesn't mean anything."

So she added a third column, and for the rest of the morning she wrote down every call with the time it was made, and when the reversal came, or did not come, she wrote that down too. She used the hall clock, which was electric and had a sweep second hand.

By noon there were thirty-one calls on the board. When Mr. Bauman had called a reversal less than about half a turn before it came, he had been right on all of them but one. When he had called it a full turn or more ahead he had been right on about two of every three. There were only four calls of two turns or more, and he had been right on two of those, which was what anyone would get by tossing a coin.

He read the board for a long time while the wheel went on turning behind him.

"That's about how it feels," he said.

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On the Wednesday afternoon the fair board decided the wheel was an attraction. Mrs. Kinsinger came to the table with a large pickle jar with a slot cut in the lid, and a stack of paper slips, and a hand-lettered card that said: WHICH WAY WILL THE WATER CLOCK BE TURNING AT THE NOON WHISTLE ON SATURDAY? 10¢ A GUESS. PROCEEDS TO 4-H. PRIZE: ONE SMOKED HAM (Donated by Shaffer's Locker Plant). The noon whistle was the one on the creamery across the road, which blew at twelve every day except Sunday and could be heard from the fairground.

By the Thursday morning there were perhaps two hundred slips in the jar. Mr. Bauman had not put one in.

"Can you call it?" Della asked him. She had come early, before the hall was open, and found him already sitting on a folding chair outside the side door waiting for the janitor.

"Not from here," he said. Then, after a moment, "Can you?"

She said she didn't think anybody could. But she said it as a thing she believed rather than a thing she knew, and she found she did not like the difference.

So before the hall opened, she and Mr. Bauman and Dale tried an experiment. She turned off the tap and let the wheel run down and the cans drain, which took nearly twenty minutes, and when the last of them had stopped dripping she had Dale wipe each one dry inside with a rag. She turned the wheel by hand until the valve stem stood exactly at twelve and wedged it there with a clothespin against the frame. She opened the tap to the new nail-varnish mark Dale had made on Tuesday, and checked it with the Mason jar: twenty-six seconds. Then, while Mr. Bauman held his railroad watch and called the seconds, she pulled the clothespin out at the top of a minute.

Dale stood at the blackboard and wrote down the time of each reversal, by Mr. Bauman's watch, and which way the wheel went afterwards.

When the wheel had made six reversals she turned off the tap, and they did the whole thing over again. Run the wheel down; drain the cans; dry them; valve stem to twelve; clothespin; tap to the mark, twenty-six seconds in the jar; pull the clothespin at the top of a minute. Dale wrote the second run in a column beside the first.

The first reversal in the second run came one second later than the first reversal in the first run. The second reversal came four seconds later. The third came nineteen seconds later, and the wheel did not go so far before it. Between the third and fourth reversals, in the first run, the wheel had gone eastward for nearly two turns. In the second run it went eastward for about a third of a turn, stopped, and went westward and kept on going westward for three minutes, which was longer than it had gone in any one direction since Tuesday. After that there was no use comparing them.

Mr. Bauman stood in front of the two columns with his watch still open in his hand.

"Same water," he said.

"Not quite. I can't set the tap any closer than I can see the mark. And the cans won't be equally dry. And I can't pull the pin at exactly the same instant. You called the second, but I'd guess I was a fifth of a second out one way or the other."

"A fifth of a second."

"Or less. I don't really know."

"And three reversals later it's going the other way."

"Three or four."

He closed the watch.

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He did not give up, which she had rather expected him to do. He was in the hall at ten the next morning with a notebook and his watch, and he spent most of the day trying to make the calls better.

He measured the flow of the hose himself with the Mason jar every half hour, because the water pressure in the hall dropped when the dairy barn was hosing down at milking time and he had seen that the wheel ran differently then. He wrote the times down. He worked out, by watching, that the wheel was much more likely to reverse after a long fast run than after a short slow one, and how much more likely, and he used that. He asked Dale to drive a second nail-hole into the one can whose hole had rusted half shut, so that all twelve would drain alike, and Dale did it, and Mr. Bauman said that helped a little.

Della kept the blackboard. By the end of the Friday there were a hundred and sixty calls on it, in five columns now. She worked the figures that evening at her kitchen table, after Dale had gone to bed. With all the attention he had paid, Mr. Bauman was right on nine calls in ten at a full turn ahead, which was better than the Wednesday. At two turns ahead he was right on about two in three. At three turns ahead, and beyond, he was right on about half.

So two days of work had moved him about one turn further out.

She tried to estimate what it would take to move him one turn further again, and came to the conclusion that it would be about as much as he had already done, and that the turn after that would take as much as both together. She did not try to work out how many turns of the wheel there were between Friday night and the noon whistle. She put the pencil down and went to bed.

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On the Saturday the hall was full by eleven, mainly because of the pickle jar, which had nearly six hundred slips in it. Mrs. Kinsinger had said she would draw one at random from among the correct guesses. Mr. Bauman sat on his folding chair at the front of the table with his watch in his hand.

At half past eleven a man from the Wooster road whom Della did not know asked him which way it would be going at noon.

"Ask me at eleven fifty-nine," Mr. Bauman said.

At eleven fifty-five the wheel was going eastward fairly fast. At eleven fifty-six it slowed. At eleven fifty-seven it stopped and went west, and somebody in the crowd cheered and somebody else groaned, though it was still three minutes to the hour and nothing had been decided. It went westward for a turn and a quarter and slowed again. The crowd went quiet.

Mr. Bauman watched it. Della was watching him. He did not seem to be thinking about anything; he seemed only to be looking very hard. At eleven fifty-nine by his watch, with the wheel nearly stopped and the top can almost full, he said, "Holds west. Through the whistle."

The can filled. The wheel did not reverse. It picked up a little speed westward, and the next can came under the hose, and then the next, and the whistle at the creamery blew at what Mr. Bauman's watch said was twelve o'clock and nine seconds, and the wheel was turning west.

There were a hundred and ninety-one slips in the jar that said West. Mrs. Kinsinger had Dale reach in without looking, and they took the slips out one at a time and put the East ones aside until Dale came to a West one, which was the third slip he drew. It had been put in by Carol Shaffer, who was eight and whose father owned the locker plant, and who had put it in on the Wednesday afternoon because, she said, the clock had been going west when she came in.

There was some laughter about that. Mr. Shaffer said he supposed he was buying the ham back. Several people shook Mr. Bauman's hand, and one of the boys who had been betting pennies on the Tuesday asked him how he had known. He said he hadn't known until he'd said it.

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The fair closed at six. The Grange people began taking down the tables at the other end of the hall, and Dale went out to find his friends. Della turned the tap back a quarter of a turn to the first nail-varnish mark, the Monday mark, and checked it with the Mason jar: forty seconds, or near enough.

The wheel ran down slowly as it adjusted. It went west and stopped and went east for half a turn and stopped. Then it went west again and kept on going west. After ten minutes it was going round once in a little over four minutes, the valve stem moving past the painted hours, through four and five and six, as steadily as on the Monday.

Mr. Bauman had stayed in his chair. He took out his watch and timed it once round. Four minutes nine seconds. He timed it again. Four minutes and ten.

"I could tell you where it'll be at noon Monday," he said. "If you leave it running."

"I believe you could," Della said.

He put the watch back in his vest pocket and sat for a while longer with his hands on his knees, watching the cans come up under the hose one after another. Then he got up, folded his chair, and carried it across the hall to the stack against the far wall.

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Edward Lorenz, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Nōnās Octōbrēs (3 October 2026), ab Edvardō Lorenz per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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