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A pendulum clock is a clock that uses a pendulum, a swinging weight, as its timekeeping element. The advantage of a pendulum for timekeeping is that it is an approximate harmonic oscillator : It swings back and forth in a precise time interval dependent on its length, and resists swinging at other rates.
The most accurate pendulum clocks were controlled electrically. [166] The Shortt–Synchronome clock, an electrical driven pendulum clock designed in 1921, was the first clock to be a more accurate timekeeper than the Earth itself. [167] A succession of innovations and discoveries led to the invention of the modern quartz timer.
Original pendulum clock by S. Coster, after Huygens' design (1657). Salomon Coster (c. 1620–1659) was a Dutch clockmaker of the Hague, who in 1657 was the first to make a pendulum clock, which had been invented by Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695). [1] [2] Coster died a sudden death in 1659.
The pendulum, due to its isochronism, could be a much better timekeeper. His son Vincenzio began building a clock, but both he and Galileo died before it was completed. The first pendulum clock was built in 1657 by Christiaan Huygens using a different design. The pendulum clock remained the world's most accurate timekeeper for 300 years, until ...
Before the invention of the pendulum clock, timepieces were accurate to only within ten to fifteen minutes a day. The use of the pendulum made for near frictionless time keeping, ensuring that the mechanism lost measurement of only a few seconds a day: a sixty-fold improvement. It was termed a "horological breakthrough".
1656 - Christiaan Huygens builds the first accurate pendulum clock. [6] 1676 - Daniel Quare, a London clock-maker, invents the repeating clock, that chimes the number of hours (or even minutes). [7] 1680 - Second hand introduced
A pendulum clock was first operated in a constant-pressure tank by Friedrich Tiede in 1865 at the Berlin Observatory, [93] [94] and by 1900 the highest precision clocks were mounted in tanks that were kept at a constant pressure to eliminate changes in atmospheric pressure.
Sixteen years after the invention of the pendulum clock, in 1673, Huygens published his major work on horology entitled Horologium Oscillatorium: Sive de Motu Pendulorum ad Horologia Aptato Demonstrationes Geometricae (The Pendulum Clock: or Geometrical demonstrations concerning the motion of pendula as applied to clocks). It is the first ...