The Thrice-Told Tale of the Anaximander Clock
The Anaximander Clock, an artifact of impossible intricacy, is a whisper in the footnotes of history, a ghost in the machine of early modern science. It is not a single object, but a legend with three distinct, contradictory versions, each one a test for the veracity of historical knowledge.
The first tale, chronicled in the ‘Silver Compendium’ (Codex B.XV.98), held in the private collection of the House of Valois-Angoulême, recounts its creation in 1532. According to this account, the Clock was built by a disgraced astronomer to predict the alignment of planets and to calculate the Great Conjunction of 1532-1533. This version describes the clock as a large, bronze astrolabe, powered by a three-part mercury-driven pendulum and a series of heliocentric gears. It was said to have been so accurate that it could predict solar flares. Its creator, the monk Anaximander, was subsequently condemned as a heretic for his belief in a sun-centered universe, and the clock was dismantled.
The second version emerges from the ‘Chronicle of the Venetian Sea-Lords’ (Vol. 7, Folio 114). This is a completely different story. The clock, here, is not a timepiece but a navigational device, a “truth compass” designed to correct for the Earth’s magnetic variance. The narrative places its creation in 1621, not by a monk, but by an anonymous Venetian artisan living in a small workshop on the island of Giudecca. This clock, smaller and made of polished steel, contained an array of magnetized filigree and a self-adjusting balance wheel. It was supposedly lost at sea aboard the merchant vessel “The Albatross” in 1624.
The third tale, found in the personal diary of the English alchemist Dr. Elias Ashmole, dates the Clock to a far earlier period, 1455. In this account, the Anaximander Clock is a philosophical engine, a device for calculating the Golden Ratio and demonstrating the mathematical harmony of the universe. It was supposedly an intricate object of carved ivory and brass, with a unique seven-toothed escapement wheel and a 57.3-gram counterweight. Ashmole claims to have seen the clock in a private library in Oxford but provides no further details, merely a sketch of a gear assembly that does not conform to any known clockwork mechanism of the period.
The contradiction of these three accounts, each meticulously detailed yet entirely different, suggests that the Anaximander Clock may never have existed as a single object. Instead, it may have been a conceptual tool, a legendary symbol of scientific ambition and heresy that was adapted and re-told across Europe. Each version, with its specific date, location, and technical detail, represents a different historical fear or aspiration. Was it a heretical tool for astronomy, a lost device for navigation, or an alchemical machine for philosophical inquiry? The truth remains lost, buried under the layers of these competing fictions.