The Present

Because it actually is.

The Present is built around a movement that was designed from the ground up to last as long as possible on a single set of batteries.

There’s nothing off-the-shelf about it. No extras. No bloat. Just a handful of parts doing exactly what they need to do, and nothing more.

The heart of it is a custom circuit and code created by Josh Levine (Josh.com) – one of those rare engineers who can think in decades, not product cycles. Inside the clock:

• The electronics sip about 1 microamp continuously.
  
• The hand only moves once every 2 hours 26 minutes.
  
• Each step is 1⁄3600 of a full circle.
  

That’s it.

Wake up, move a tiny bit, go back to sleep.

On purpose, the movement draws so little power that the limiting factor isn’t “running out of battery,” it’s time itself – the slow aging of materials, seals, and chemistry.

The math (why a century is conservative)

The Present movement uses less than 9 milliamp-hours of energy per year.

Even if we’re conservative and say each lithium AA pack starts at 2600 mAh (instead of the 3000 mAh they’re typically rated for), the numbers look like this:

• Clock draw: ~8.94 mAh per year
  
• Battery capacity (conservative): 2600 mAh
  
• 2600 ÷ 8.94 ≈ 291 years
  

If you use the more realistic 3000 mAh figure, you get:

• 3000 ÷ 8.94 ≈ 335 years
  

So in pure energy terms, if nothing ever leaks, corrodes, or jams, the stored power is enough to keep the hand tracing the year for roughly three centuries.

That’s why we say it is “engineered to run for one century” – because one century is actually the cautious version of what the engineering supports.

Why lithium, and why it matters

We ship The Present with lithium AA cells, hot-glued into place, not alkaline.

That matters for two reasons:

1. Leakage:
   
   Alkaline cells are notorious for leaking over time. Lithium cells have an extremely low leakage rate – orders of magnitude lower – which is why they were originally marketed as “never leak.” Under extreme heat or humidity anything can fail, but lithium is by far the most stable choice.
   
2. Self-discharge:
   
   Lithium cells lose their charge very slowly over decades. Your Year clock uses roughly 0.34% of the pack per year. Over long spans, the batteries will lose as much or more energy simply existing as they do actually running the clock.
   

In other words: the movement is so efficient that, over time, the batteries themselves are the “noisy” part of the system.

Built like a long-term instrument, not a gadget

The movement sits on a custom PCB with a thin layer of gold on the traces for longevity.

The gear shafts are modified and fused to reduce the number of ticks by a factor of 60 compared to a normal clock, and the motor is driven in a way that pulls from one battery on one step and the other on the next.

Torque is sufficient, parts are few, and there’s very little to wear out.

This isn’t a mass-market clock mechanism slapped into a pretty shell.

It’s an intentionally over-engineered, ultra-low-power time instrument.

So when we say:

“Designed, engineered to run for one century, really.”

we mean:

• The math points to ~291–335 years of available energy.
  
• We deliberately under-promise at one century.
  
• And we fully expect some of these timepieces to still be sweeping the year well into the next century – and quite possibly the one after that – on the batteries they shipped with.