Description

The Gdańsk Science Museum (formerly the Tower Clocks Museum) is located in the tower of the Church of St. Catherine (Alexandrian) in Gdańsk. The Museum was made as a result of the agreement concluded by the management of the former Historical Museum of the City of Gdańsk with the Order of Carmelites in 1996. It is the only museum of tower clocks in Poland. Our Museum has gathered a collection of clocks from the entire period of mechanical and mechanical-electric watchmaking. You can see mechanisms dated back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century, as well as those created after World War II. Among them are such rarities as the original barrel clock, one of the few surviving in Europe, the clock from the only Polish factory of tower clocks by Michał Mięsowicz from Krosno, and even the mechanism from the British Isles.

In 2011, in connection with the 400th anniversary of Hevelius' birth, the first clock in the world made in the technology of pulsar signals, built at the Gdańsk Science Museum, was installed in the attics of the museum. This clock uses pulses from pulsars (a type of neutron star) as a time base and is the only clock based on a phenomenon far beyond Earth; Pulsars at a distance of 5,000 - 10,000 light years were selected for this. Moreover, theory predicts that it may become the most accurate time pattern ever constructed.