the sands of time (12. 603)

Via Boing Boing, we enjoyed this partial listing of superlative hour-glasses, including the pictured Sanduhr encountered on a museum tour of Mainz crafted in 1984 by Schott Glasweke for the city, flipping hourly. One of the largest permanent installations is the Timewheel (Időkerék) of Budapest. The sixty tonne granite and steel time-piece was created to commemorate the accession of Hungary into the European Union on the first of May 2004. Standing on a site that formerly hosted a statue of Lenin, it was rebalanced shortly after its unveiling to measure out the year and is turned one hundred eighty degrees by a crew of four at the stroke of midnight on the first of January. Several large hour-glasses were installed in large cities in the state of São Paulo to mark the seventh of August 2009 enforcement of smoke-free workplaces progressively throughout Brazil—presumably to mark the next cigarette break.