The reality clamp was invented by Rick Yukon while aboard a North Sea frigate owned by the now defunct United Crushing Corporation. Yukon was originally employed the vessel as a compression engineer brought on for a single voyage in 1988 to monitor a steam retrofit. After a minor accident with no injuries but some damage to the ship’s engine room, Yukon’s credentials were called into question by the ship operators and corporate administrator. With extensive ship-to-shore communications, it was decided that Yukon had likely fraudulently obtained his compression certifications and his verifiable experience suggested that he knew little about the steam compression equipment on-board the commercial vessel.
After a discussion with the ship’s captain which resulted in a damaged bowling trophy, Yukon was decided to be a security risk by the ship’s captain and was confined to one of the ship’s interior storage rooms. It was during this forced confinement that Yukon derived his “ground state energy characteristic time transfer” theorem, which connected the Planck length to the speed of photons and neutrinos in objects of mass. Given the security considerations of the ship’s captain, Yukon was not allowed access to pencils and pens, but he was provided with a box of soft grease pencils with which he used to calculate and document his work on a hydrophobic surface of his own formulation and deposition. (This was the first recorded use of the “Eureka Rewrite” brand of rewritable tablet.)
During this two-month-long period of applied theory work conducted by Yukon, he reportedly devised the “Reality Clamp” which he used as a memory aid worn on his wrist. He found that he tended to eat through all of his day’s rations at once, which left him too tired to work. His goal was to remember to space out the consumption of his rations for two or three times per day. He designed the first ever Reality Clamp using material in the storage room, to both be “visually undeniable and physically unremarkable.” His first attempts to create an uncomfortable reality clamp using wire points didn’t work because he removed the device to work as grew too uncomfortable to wear.. He then made a version out of cotton strips, which he reported to be so comfortable that he forgot he had it on. His third attempt was an intermediate device made with corrugated paperboard and shock cord, which allowed for a small amount of discomfort and visual attention, and which he found highly effective as a memory aid.
The design and specific metrics of the Reality Clamp was unpublished until the intellectual property for the device was donated to the Crunchy Case air pollution project by the estate of Rick Yukon and Dr. Cassandra St. Clair.