Rasmus Sørnes

Rasmus Jonassen Sørnes, 1893-1967, inventor, clockmaker and radio technician is most famous for his astronomical clocks, but also designed in his lifetime a large variety of agricultural, radio-technical and mechanical devices, only a few of them patented.

Rasmus Sørnes was born in Sola in Norway on March 22, 1893. Certified as an electrician at Stavanger Technical School, he was a man of modest education, but was self-taught in a variety of scientific trades and technological disciplines, including advanced mathematics, physics and astronomy. He enjoyed frequent collaboration with the university research communities. He lectured lens making to optics students and clockmaking to watchmaker students, having formal education in neither.

Still a child, he designed and constructed an electrically driven water pump with level indicator to be used at his parent’s farm. He made his own combustion engine in 1910, constructed a turbine power plant and in 1926 a tractor. He patented a chicken incubator and a milk/cream separator. In 1913 he patented corrugated diaphragms in loudspeakers for better sound quality. While commercial industry was uninterested in this feature for the lifetime of the patent, this has in modern times become a standard of loudspeaker design.

In 1922 he was employed as a technician at Ullandhaug Radio, and the same year built his own radio station transmitting regular news flash broadcasts from his own home, possibly the first broadcast in Norway. He designed the first automatic model railway in Norway, to be used in a shop window exhibition and a solar panel driven signal steering engine for lighthouses. In the early 1930s he constructed his first astronomical clock and at the same time a large reflecting telescope.

His second clock was an experiment, leading on to his third clock exhibited at Borgarsyssel museum in Sarpsborg, Norway. The principal design of gear trains and transmissions is similar to his fourth and final clock, arguably the most complicated of its kind, which was finished in 1967. Made on his spare time, with his own funding and using his own self-made tools. The clock was from 1967 exhibited at the Time Museum in Rockford, Illinois, and later at the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology until sold to an anonymous owner at Sotheby’s in 2002.

The clock No. 4 is a magnificent fusion of art, craftsmanship and electromechanical technology, engraved and with gold and silver plating. Every part of the clock was hand made in his workshop with the sole exception of the pendulum itself. It’s astounding features includes: Locations of the sun and moon in the zodiac, Julian calendar, Gregorian calendar, sidereal time, GMT, local time with day-light saving time and leap year, solar and lunar cycle corrections, eclipses, local sunset and sunrise, moon phase, tides, sunspot cycles and a planetarium including Pluto's 248 year orbit and the 25 800 year period of the polar ecliptics (precession of the earth's axis).

Rasmus Sørnes is the father of Tor Sørnes inventor of the keycard lock.

References

* Tor Sørnes. "The Clockmaker Rasmus Sørnes". Borgarsyssel Museum, Sarpsborg Norway, 2003 Norwegian edition, and 2006 English edition.