Here is an old puzzle: There are two objects that are used for the same purpose. One has thousands of moving parts, the other has none. What do they do and what are they? The answer is that they both tell the time. The first one is an hourglass and the second is a sundial.

Last Sunday I took a trip to the town of Jędrzejów, near Kielce. I had been there before because it has a narrow-gauge railway (running in the spring and summer). A student of mine told me about the famous clock museum and, interested to see what a clock museum would be like, I took the overnight train and got to the empty town square early in the morning. The museum was supposed to open at 8AM and sure enough, right on time, it did.

Now I find nearly all subjects interesting but even if the idea of a clock museum sounds boring to you, think again. The very friendly and knowledgeable guide took me on a personal tour of the building and the exhibits in it. The way everything is explained and displayed is enough to interest anyone in the subject.

The house was an old pharmacy and the rooms have been reconstructed the way they were in the early 20^th century. The family tree was the first item the guide showed me. It is a wonderful, complex painting which must have taken weeks or months to finish. The kitchen, library and living rooms are full of expensive furniture that no average manual worker of the time would have been used to.

But the most important items are the timepieces. As well as a large collection of wind-up and pendulum clocks, the museum has cabinets of sandglasses (normally called hourglasses). These are true works of art as each one is made by hand (there were no production lines in those days). Personally I can watch those things for ages. It beats television most of the time.

Then the guide took me to the main exhibits: the third largest collection of sundials in the world (after Oxford and Chicago). There are about 600 in the collection (not all of them are on display. That would require a much larger building). They include the usual stone examples that are put on walls or in a garden but also several other types. Some are portable and there are even ones that can fit in a pocket. Many include a compass to point them in the right direction and spirit levels so that they sit perfectly flat. Others are held up to the sun (so you don't need to know where north is) and the length of the shadow shows the time. They work differently in different parts of the world so some of them have each capital city's own scale written on them.

I could spend pages describing everything, or just point out that it is open all year round (not Mondays) and easy to get to by train. Now, I've heard of a couple of other unusual ideas for museums which I haven't visited yet. In Greenwich, London, there is a fan museum (hand fans, not electric ones). That must be worth a visit. Then in Berlin there is the next place on my list to see: a museum of sugar.

Glossary

an hourglass klepsydra

a sundial zegar słoneczny

narrow-gauge railway kolej wąskotorowa

an exhibit eksponat

a family tree drzewo genealogiczne

a timepiece czasomierz

a spirit level poziomnica

flat płaski

a shadow cień

a fan wachlarz

Rearrange the letters to create different ways to measure the time.