Tasting time

Today if you want to check the time at the middle of the night, you either have a backlit watch or may be a talking clock. Well back in the seventeenth century, when neither of that existed, M. de Villayer, a French inventor, tried using the sense of taste.

He designed a clock so arranged that when he reached for the hour hand at night, it guided him to a small container with a spice inserted in place of numbers, a different spice for every hour of the night. Even when he could not see the clock, he could always taste the time.