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Sometimes a good idea doesn't work, and the reason is that it remained close in its box.
This is probably one of the most particular masterpieces of the human intelligence. A friend once had the kindness to paint a small painting of this masterpiece for me, and I keep it jealously.
This is something so technological imagining and out of the lines born from the imagination of Giambattista Embriaco, a Dominican Order's monk.
He invented the hydro-chronometer.
This is something that has nothing to do with a clepsydra or a simple water clock, but this is a real clock.
This is composed by two containers in which, the water filling it, gives impulse to an independent pendulum and charges the movement and alarm-clock of quarters.
The clock was sent to Paris in 1867 for the universal expo, but because of a mistake in the organisation remained in its box, and it has been even strongly damaged.
When Embriaco came to Paris, discovered the situation but without any hesitation he didn’t lose time, he repaired and installed the hydro-chronometer that worked perfectly.
Napoleon III was very impressive of this opera and asked to understand its mechanism by the St Claud castle. A French industrial bought the patent for the French market because many French cities, not only Paris, planned to put a clock like this into city fountains, but then any clock hasn’t been realised.
Three of these clocks, which the only inconvenient is that these don’t work under frost condition, were installed in three different buildings in Rome. Two models in reduced dimensions are present even by the Museo dell’Orologio in Rome, and by Wuttembersgiches-Landes-Gewerbemuseum in Stuttgart (Germany).
Some ideas are awfully good, but when nobody believes in it or sees how these can change the rules these remain only “good idea” unfortunately. Only studying the right commercial strategy, good ideas can become working ideas.