Jubilee Clock Tower Time Ball in Brighton, England

Brighton's Jubilee Clock Tower, built in eighteen eighty-eight to honor Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, is beloved as a city landmark—but its most ingenious feature is also its most infamous flaw. According to Atlas Obscura, the tower features a gilded copper ball engineered by local inventor Magnus Volk, designer of Volks Railway, the oldest surviving electric railway in Brighton. Volk's hydraulic mechanism was brilliant in concept: the ball would slide up and down a vertical rod to indicate the time of day. But wind whistling through the rod proved so deafening that the device was disabled shortly after completion and lay dormant until a two thousand two refurbishment—now it's more decorative than dependable.

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