Earthquake chimes

[gfish]

I just finished Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility: The Ideas Behind The World's Slowest Computer, which was a fun and interesting (if ever so slightly wankery) read. It offhandedly mentioned a really amazing idea: earthquake chimes! This conjured some very impressive mental images of a rack of suspended I-beams, or church-bell-sized ingots in a delicate whiffletree arrangement, just waiting for an earthquake large enough to set them in motion.

Sadly, I don't a set has ever been made. I did find reference to a "seismofon" installation at a museum. They are computer controlled to react to earthquakes anywhere in the world. Neat, but not of any particularly inspiring dimension.

If anyone has an atrium they need filling, I think you should really consider this option.

Comments

[maellenkleth]

When you were at UBC, was the big pendulum still setup in one of the atrium spaces of the Hebb office block (between Hennings and Chemistry)? That thing was seriously imposing. ^_^

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Hrm, I must have missed that. I explored the campus a lot more than most grad students, but I was still pretty isolated in ICICS.

[maellenkleth]

Oh, we also at one point had a 6-metre set of copper pipe chimes (10 cm nominal diameter) hanging from a fir tree on NW 87th in Seattle. Neighbours loved them; they only really kicked in during storms. Getting them **up** that tree was fun; hung them with aircraft cable (which was protected with Delrin sleeves where it passed through the upper balance-points of the pipes).

Somewhere around here I have the lengths and hole positions for them. I do shudder to think how spendy that much hard-drawn copper pipe in that large a diameter would cost nowadays.

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

I'd love to help, but I'm saving my atrium for a full-size apocalypse pipe organ.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

I can't argue with that. Much better than plague accordions, certainly.

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I know a guy whose garage was infested with those things. The postal workers refused to stop at his house for a while.

[neuro42.livejournal.com]

'plague accordion' sounds like it should be a dysphemism for bagpipes.

[keystricken.livejournal.com]

I've never seen the word 'dysphemism' before. Awesome!

[mdlbear]

We have a rack-full of suspended pots and pans that serves as an excellent earthquake detector for quakes of magnitude 5 and over.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I'd be glad to build one but it would be completely pointless where I live. Boyce@downmoo was building a set of windchimes out of oxygen and argon tanks he'd sawed the bottoms off of, in the hopes of getting tones you felt in your teeth: I need to catch up with him and see what's happening with that.
SOME day I mean to build an aeolean harp. I know boxofdelights's husband was working on one at some point. That would make sense around here. Maybe it could be a tornado-harp, to go along with the earthquake-chimes.
It probably wouldn't be difficult at all to make a wave gong, using a float that smacked against a gong-ish object that was itself set on larger floats to track tide rather than waves, but I don't think it'd fare well in a tidal wave.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

Hurricane pipe organs!