“When I saw this, I thought, ‘We’re getting duped here,’” Talbot told The Daily Beast, adding, “Anybody who knows electronics really well needs less than five seconds to know that was a clock taken out of the box.” “This is simply taking a clock out of its case, and I think probably for provocative reasons, intentionally,” he said in his video. “This was put in here to look like a device, with these cables and these… to look like a device that would be suspicious, and I think intentionally so,” he says of the design. In his video, Talbot displays a photo of Mohamed’s clock and on screen, flashes an arrow over a tangle of cords jutting from the case. Thomas Talbot, an electronics author and prominent medical virtual reality scientist, said the clock’s printed circuit boards and ribbon cables, along with the 9-volt battery backup, are signs of a commercial product.
“A silly prank that was taken the wrong way? That the media then ran with, and everyone else got carried away? Maybe there wasn’t even any racial or religious bias on the parts of the teachers and police.”ĭiPasquale does not appear to have offered any evidence supporting his hoax theory.Ī research scientist narrated a similar takedown of Mohamed’s device on YouTube and faced a surge of negative comments accusing him of racism and of picking on a 14-year-old kid. “Because, is it possible, that maybe, just maybe, this was actually a hoax bomb?” he wrote. But DiPasquale says that Mohamed and his poorly repurposed clock aren’t the problem-it’s the knee-jerk reaction from the press and social media activists crying racism and attacking school administrators and police without knowing all the facts. Since carrying a pencil box is not a crime, Mohamed does not, presumably, owe anyone an explanation. Why did he choose a pencil box, one that looks like a miniature briefcase no less, as an enclosure for a clock?” DiPasquale wrote. “I’m curious, why would ‘looking suspicious’ have even crossed his mind before this whole event unfolded, if he was truly showing off a hobby project, something so innocuous as an alarm clock. In one interview, for example, Mohamed says he closed the pencil case with a cord so it wouldn’t look suspicious in school. The public outcry over Mohamed’s arrest was also, presumably, less about the clock and more about what it says about us, as a society, that such a thing would happen.ĭiPasquale questioned if other aspects of the teenager’s story about the clock aren’t being fully reported or fact-checked by reporters. “Here we have a social media frenzy going on, with everybody to the president of the United States giving him a pat on the back, and I started thinking less about the clock, and more about us, as a society,” he added. “So I read some more about the story, and nowhere did I see anybody actually bring that point up.” “Anyone with even a basic hobby-level understanding could see it was a commercially available mass-produced product that was just taken out of its enclosure, and placed in a pencil box,” DiPasquale told The Daily Beast. He noted other “dead giveaways” of a store-bought clock, including a switch to select 12- or 24-hour time and a battery backup. He traced the 1980s-era circuit board, which has a silk-screened “M” logo, to a vintage Micronta clock found on eBay. He didn’t even build a clock.”ĭiPasquale said all signs point to a mass-produced model. “Ahmed Mohamed didn’t invent his own alarm clock. “Somewhere in all of this-there has indeed been a hoax,” he wrote in a controversial post on Artvoice. “Whether or not he wanted the police to arrest him, they shouldn’t have done so.”īut the self-styled electronics geek says that Mohamed’s homemade gadget is actually a factory-produced clock. “If this is true, what was his motive?” Dawkins wrote. The fact that a teenager was put in handcuffs over his clock appears to be less of a concern to some people than the apparently shoddy engineering of the “invention” in question.Įlectronics experts who examined photos of 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed’s creation called it a fraud loudly enough to grab the attention of famed atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins, who on Sunday tweeted: “We were all fooled.”ĭawkins went as far as suggesting the ninth-grader had a “motive” for his arrest over the digital clock, which was inside a black pencil case and tied shut with a cable. The Muslim teen who became an overnight celebrity after Texas cops mistook his homemade clock for a bomb has received a White House invitation, shoutouts from Facebook, MIT, and NASA, and more than $15,000 for an academic scholarship.īut some engineers say something’s fishy about the high schooler’s invention, and the Internet has been lit aflame by claims of conspiracy.
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