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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.
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.
And also the basis of the slave pendulum in the Shortt-Synchronome free pendulum clock. [79] A gathering arm attached to the pendulum moves a 15-tooth count wheel in one position, with a pawl preventing movement in the reverse direction. The wheel has a vane attached which, once per 30-second turn, releases the gravity arm.
Cuckoo clock, a so-called Jagdstück ("hunt piece"), Black Forest, c. 1900, Deutsches Uhrenmuseum, Inv. 2006-013. A cuckoo clock is a type of clock, typically pendulum driven, that strikes the hours with a sound like a common cuckoo call and has an automated cuckoo bird that moves with each note.
Pendulum clocks were used as time standards until World War 2, although the French Time Service continued using them in their official time standard ensemble until 1954. [70] Pendulum gravimeters were superseded by "free fall" gravimeters in the 1950s, [71] but pendulum instruments continued to be used into the 1970s.
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The earliest known example of a clockwork set-up is the Antikythera mechanism.This device functioned as a geared analogue computer after its creation during the first-century BCE timeframe, being somewhat astrolabe-like, and had gotten designed for calculating astronomical positions and particularly listing eclipses.