Immagine: 43,98 KB IDEA AND ITS HISTORY
The idea for CYCLOS arose from the unsatisfying double meaning of the usual 12-hour scale. Every point on the scale designates both the day’s cycle and that of the night, without being able to differentiate between them. In the English speaking world one adds "ante meridian” or "post meridian” in order to make the distinction clear. The well known 24-hour clock, on which the hours are all ordered in one circle, has the disadvantage that one has to change ones perception of the angles of the hand in order to read the time.
In 1989 the architect and designer John C. Ermel, working on an order for a new watch design, had the idea of making the difference between the cycles of day and night obvious. This could be achieved by using a radially adjustable hour hand. He arranged the scale of hours on a so-called "Pascal’s spiral”, a conchoid of a circle, a special cycloid achieved by overlapping the usual clockwise rotation with translation in the radial direction – in this case a sine curve with a cycle of 24 hours.
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