Octopod Swiss Table Clock Tells Time, Looks Like A Robot Octopus

Octopod is the steampunk octopus clock nobody needs, but you’ll definitely want

By Luke Dormehl September 25, 2017

OCTOPOD - MB&F + L'Epée 1839

Are you on the lookout for an innovative timepiece, and worried that regular smartwatches are so 2016? Have you ever dreamed of owning your own steampunk octopus? Thanks to the ingenuity of Swiss designers, you can now kill two birds with one stone by purchasing your very own Octopod, a luxury table clock that mounts the inner workings of a high-end mechanical clock on eight finely articulated legs.

“Octopod is a mechanical table clock, co-created by MB&F who conceived it and L’Epée 1839 who manufacture it,” Charris Yadigaroglou, chief communications officer at MB&F, told Digital Trends. “It gives you the time, but that’s really not the point: time is a secondary benefit. We see mechanical watches and table clocks as kinetic sculptures, as mechanical art pieces. And like art, they should stir up emotions and memories. Octopod reminds us of underwater adventures like the James Cameron classic The Abyss, of marine compasses, of octopuses, and other cephalopods – that’s where it got its name.”

The piece itself is pretty stunning to behold. 28 cm tall, including its posable legs, the clock mechanism is viewable through a bubble-like glass sphere. It’s available in three different color finishes — black, blue, and silver — with each color limited to 50 units. (Oh, and in keeping with the whole “octo” thing, you only need to wind it every eight days!)

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robot octopus clock octopod insitu hres cmyk — Image used with permission by copyright holder

robot octopus clock octopod face blue hres cmyk — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Image used with permission by copyright holder

robot octopus clock octopod top black hres cmyk — Image used with permission by copyright holder

robot octopus clock octopod closeup hres cmyk — Image used with permission by copyright holder

“There were many [challenges developing it],” Yadigaroglou continued. “Without getting too technical, the vast majority of mechanical watches and clocks today are simply variations of existing movements – engineers will tweak an existing movement a bit, optimize it, but they rarely develop entirely new movements. That’s why most watches are round! In the case of Octopod, almost everything had to be created from scratch. Not just the movement, whose regulating system is placed very unconventionally on the minute hand, and therefore circles around the clock in 60 minutes, but also the structure of the clock itself.”

If you like what you see, first visit MB&F’s website for more information about the various retailers around the world. Then start planning how to justify to your significant other spending $36,200 on a mecha-octopus clock.

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