When you think about it, a date and time are sort-of endlessly
disposed of. A clock generates a display, which within a minute, or
even just a second, is worthless. It's actually a constant waste of
energy except for those moments when someone views it. That's no
more the case than with thousands of other machines, sure, but it's
an interesting thought that brings me to the idea of representing
the time in a way that can be gainfully consumed afterwards. It
brings me to a clock that displays the time in chocolate.
I haven't got a great deal of technical detail on this one, but
basically you have a conveyor belt (it may actually be an
unspooling roll of baking paper to avoid issues with cleaning), and
at one end a clocolate dispenser working on pressurised air.
There's a row of tubes so that lines can be built up like a
dot-matrix printer (with only one horizontal row of pins), with one
line running all the way through the middle in order to join the
printed numbers together in a row. The number cools and solidifies
traveling down the conveyor belt, and when it gets near the end
it's illuminated or held up or something right on the minute, after
the last minute has been ejected into a open tray for an onlooker
to take and eat.
I think for the chocolate "print head" there may need to be a
two-level system, where each individual tube has its own heated
tank and pressurised air supply controlled by an electronic valve.
Periodically after the valve has been turned off, solid pellets of
chocolate will be automatically poured in to these tanks and then
they'll be sealed again. Another option might be a big syringe and
one-way valves, but I suspect those will get clogged up easily,
whereas with a pressurised air supply more of the valves can be
kept away from the chocolate.
Then there's the question of where this machine would go. It would
be giving away free chocolate, so you really want a lot of
onlookers, and paying ones at that. It would probably be some sort
of touristy chocolate shop attraction, or maybe at a special event.
Anyway I think there's pretty long odds of someone asking me to
build one for such an installation, but it's an interesting thought.
