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He used free-swinging pendulums as timers in scientific experiments and for keeping time for music. In 1637, when he was 73, Galileo had the idea of a mechanism that would keep the pendulum swinging by giving it pushes, an escapement, thus allowing it to be applied to clocks. Since he was by then totally blind, he described the mechanism to his ...
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 pendulum was not impelled on every swing or even at a set interval of time—it was only impelled when its arc of swing had decayed below a certain level. As well as the counting pawl, the pendulum carried a small vane, known as a Hipp's toggle, pivoted at the top, which was completely free to swing.
Hillis concluded that no single source of timing could meet the requirements. As a compromise the clock will use an accurate but unreliable timer to adjust an inaccurate but reliable timer, creating a phase-locked loop. In the current design, a slow mechanical oscillator, based on a torsional pendulum, keeps time inaccurately, but reliably.
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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.
In the Riefler escapement, the energy required to keep the pendulum swinging is instead supplied by bending the short straight spring strip which suspends the pendulum. [4] The upper end of the suspension spring is not attached to a fixed support as in most clocks, but instead is attached to a heavy metal bearer, which pivots on two aligned ...
William Hamilton Shortt (1881–1971) was a railway engineer and noted horologist, responsible for the design of the Shortt-Synchronome free pendulum clock, a widely used time standard, employed internationally in observatories in the period between the two World Wars.