The concept for the Chronophage Clock was invented by Dr John C Taylor, and the Chronophage sculpture made by Matthew Lane-Sanderson
Dr John C Taylor was born in Buxton in Derbyshire, attended school on the Isle of Man and then graduated from Corpus Christi College B.A. (later M.A.) in Natural Sciences. He returned to live in the Isle of Man thirty years ago. By occupation, he is an inventor. Many of the hundreds of patents that he holds are connected with domestic appliances, thermostats, and electrical equipment. His single most famous invention is the cordless kettle, patented and used now throughout the world. The company John founded holds four Queen's Awards, three for Export and one for Innovation, conferred for his 360 degree cordless kettle connector.
His other personal interests include the study and collecting of early clocks, mountaineering, sailing and flying (he first went solo in 1953 and he still pilots his own planes). He has organised major exhibitions on seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury horology, with a special interest in the works of Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, the Fromanteel family of clockmakers and John Harrison, inventor of the marine chronometer. Clocks, offer a rare marriage between science and art, and the complexity of mechanism and utter simplicity of concept clearly link the inventions of John Taylor today with those of his horological predecessors of the past.
Once the working mechanics of a clock are in place, the instrument itself can become a medium for art, and when the clock begins to tick, with a sound like a little heartbeat of its own, it seems to John to be a living thing.
For some years he has been working
on a new form of clock, the Chronophage, a
traditional timepiece driven by a spring and paced
by a rocking escapement, as a homage to Harrison, but which
measures and shows time in an altogether original and innovative way. The first
full-sized example of this new kind of clock looks out at street level across the city
of Cambridge from the building now called the Taylor Library.