Googol Seconds Counter

While you’re no doubt familiar with the company/term Google, you may not have heard of “googol,” the number 1 to the 100th power (1 with 100 zeros behind it). If those two terms sound similar, Google, so the story goes, is actually a misspelling of the term googol.

All that being said, could you construct a counter that goes up to a googol? Would it be useful? The answer, to the first question at least, has now been answered by leethayer8 via his Googol Seconds Counter. On the other hand, he readily admits that its massive array of seven-segment displays will never reach a googol. In fact, according to ChatGPT (as I didn’t feel like inputting that many zeros), it would take 3.168 x 10^89th power millennia to get to that value.

Staggering mathematics aside, leethayer8 enjoys a good challenge, and built this counter using a 1 Hz (i.e. 1 cycle/second) master clock and 101 decade counters (no microcontroller). The device features 11 linked counter PCBs, 10 of which contain 10 decade counters and LED displays. The 11th contains only a single digit display and counter for the theoretical 1 before the 100 zeros to follow.

A final PCB houses the master clock and the power supply. Cleverly – one might say necessarily for such a lengthy period – the power board uses 12V as its primary supply, while switching to 9V if and when this goes out. While the device can, in theory, count seconds for an infinite-to-us-mere-humans time span, “just” a single row of 10 digits will take over 300 years to reach its maximum value!