When I initially saw the Water Tower Clock by Weird Creations, I really had to see it twice. Not since I didn’t comprehend it, however since I couldn’t rather believe that somebody took a look at a pile of
10-cent glass bottles and idea: yes, this is how I’m going to show the time. The principle is deceptively simple. Each digit on the clock is comprised of a fifteen-segment display screen, except instead of LEDs, each sector is a small glass bottle. When a bottle is filled with dyed water, the section is active. Empty it, and it disappears. Put enough bottles together in the ideal configuration and you get numbers. Numbers that inform you it’s 4:37 in the afternoon, rendered completely in colored water. It’s the kind of concept that sounds outrageous up until you see it running, and then it seems almost apparent.
Designer: Strange Creations
< img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/05/someone-built-a-clock-with-60-water-pumps-and-zero-regrets/water-tower-01.jpg" alt=""width ="1280"height ="960"/ > I like this for a lot of reasons, however the biggest one is that Strange Inventions didn’t try to make something effective. He made something worth taking a look at. That’s a style philosophy I respect more than I can quickly put into words. There’s a whole industry devoted to optimizing display screens, making them thinner, brighter, more power-efficient. And then someone comes along and asks, what if we pumped water into tiny bottles rather? And somehow, it works.
Behind the scenes, the build is genuinely complex. The clock utilizes 60 pumps in total, a stepper-driven peristaltic pump coupled with membrane-pump boosters, to path colored water into the precise bottles needed for each digit. The water isn’t doing any real timekeeping here. It’s purely the display medium. The electronic devices deal with the time; the water
manages the theater. The system for clearing the bottles is especially creative. Rather than separately draining each one with a different pump, Unusual Creations engineered a servo-driven linkage that flips all nine bottles in a single digit at once. It’s one movement, one pleasing dump, and the digit resets. Getting that 3D-printed system to work took considerable troubleshooting, however enjoying the completed outcome run, you ‘d never ever guess it was anything other than simple and easy.
The small bottles, by the method, were discovered in a random shop for 10 cents apiece. Sounds economical, best? Up until you scale it up to a full clock and the overall project expense lands somewhere around $ 580. That gap between low-cost products and costly fixation is really one of my favorite aspects of independent makers. The private elements are humble. The vision is not.
Visually, the Water Tower Clock sits in a classification I struggle to call. It’s not precisely art, though it definitely qualifies. It’s not simply a device, though it functions as one. It has the persistence of a kinetic sculpture and the practicality of something that in fact tells you what time it is. The dyed water capturing the light, the slow fill of each sector, the deliberate dump when a digit changes: all of it has a rhythm that a lot of digital items just don’t have.
< img src ="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/05/someone-built-a-clock-with-60-water-pumps-and-zero-regrets/water-tower-06.jpg"alt=""width="1280 "height=" 960"/ > I believe what makes tasks like this matter to the more comprehensive style conversation is that they challenge our assumptions about what a display ought to look like. We have actually become so familiar with LEDs and screens that we’ve stopped asking whether there might be a more interesting material to deal with. Odd Creations addressed that question with dyed water and glass bottles from a random shop, and the result is one of the more unforgettable pieces of functional style I’ve discovered this year.
It’s likewise, for what it deserves, entirely unwise in the very best possible method. The water will require maintenance, the pumps include intricacy, and the whole thing would be thoroughly confused by a power outage. None of that matters. The point isn’t that this is the future of clock screens. The point is that it makes you feel something when you take a look at it, which is more than many technology ever handles to do. Unusual Creations makes the name.
< img src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/05/someone-built-a-clock-with-60-water-pumps-and-zero-regrets/water-tower-08.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ > < img src ="// www.w3.org/2000/svg%22%20viewBox=%220%200%201280%20960%22%3E%3C/svg%3E" data-src="https://www.yankodesign.com/images/design_news/2026/05/someone-built-a-clock-with-60-water-pumps-and-zero-regrets/water-tower-08.jpg" alt ="" width="1280" height="960"/ >