If you’ve stuck with us through the shocking price of this hourglass, then we can delve into why someone would ever spend so much on a timepiece. The short answer is, we wouldn’t. But some might, if they have deep pockets, and a love for limited edition, painstakingly crafted precision items. Hodinkee is a company that sells premium watches and other accoutrements, and they’ve partnered with celebrity designer Marc Newson on a limited edition hourglass, filled with 1,249,996 copper nano-ball bearings.
Indeed, the precision of the ballbearings is what sets this hourglass apart from those using sand or grit. They provide a tactile quality, and produce a sound that adds to the time telling experience. The hourglass itself runs for ten minutes when turned over.
The exclusivity of the timepiece accounts for it’s high price, as does the time spent hand blowing and turning the glass for the piece, which is done by a master glassblower. The result? A fragile yet beautiful piece of functional art, something that we could see be handed down generation to generation. From Hodinkee:
Watching the Hourglass is a multi-sensory experience that cannot be communicated in words. The combination of watching those first few nanoballs bounce around the bottom chamber, the flow begin to change surface patterns in the top chamber, and the unique sound of the nanoballs flying around, hitting the glass and one another as they settle at the bottom, is utterly mesmerizing.
