Tidegauge

This gadget caught my attention as an example of equipoise in measurement. The chain has a float at one end and a weight at the other. As tide rises, the float goes up and the weight goes down. The pulley drives a sliding pencil on a graph recorder.

Far view, in my Electric Village scene, celebrating hydropower.
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Closeup view of the mechanism:

The graph cylinder is driven by a 24-hour clock, so it rotates once per day.

And here’s the equipoise in action:

I started this before the hot spell, thinking it would be an easy scene to construct, providing a cool ‘place to rest’. The chain animation turned out to require some fairly heavy programming, which wasn’t possible in the heat. Had to wait for the current brief cool spell to finish it.