![]() ![]() Sunset/sunrise and moonset/moonrise times were accurate for weeks, with stars rising and setting within a minute of the predicted time without any calibration for approximately a full month. The clock, built and calibrated in the Netherlands, was exquisitely accurate. Which is why it was such a puzzle when the first pendulum clock was brought from Europe to America. The first American-built clock wouldn’t occur for many decades after that advance, and so the first American timekeeping devices were imported. By developing a temperature-compensated pendulum - where the period of a swing didn’t change even as the temperature did - pendulum clocks could be accurate to within just a few seconds per week. The major known “source of error” that occurred with these pendulum clocks was due to temperature changes: the length of the pendulum would increase or decrease as the materials they were made out of expanded or contracted with temperature. Christian Huygens, 1658Īll of these innovations had been made prior to 1700: a remarkable set of advances in a short amount of time. Many subsequent refinements, even prior to Newton's gravity, were made to this original design. The drawings come from Huygens' 1658 treatise, Horologium. which was designed by Christiaan Huygens and built by Saloman Coster. It can be known but where day endless shines.įor more on the origins of clocks see Episodes 1506, 1307, and 1417.The front view (L) and side/schematic view (R) of the first pendulum clock ever built, in 1656/7. Voice answering voice, so musical and soft Thus saw I move the glorious wheel thus heard Sends out a tinkling sound, of note so sweet,Īffection springs in well-disposed breast The passage from Canto X of Dante's Paradiso goes as follows: To win her Bridegroom's love at matin's hour,Įach part of other fitly drawn and urged, I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we're interested in the way inventive minds work. ![]() Lewis Mumford said of the clock that it was "the key machine of the modern industrial age." He called the appearance of this first automatic machine a prophecy that "marks a perfection towards which other machines aspire." What Dante had called the glorious wheel was the doorway into our age of precision machines and high technology. Giovanni's father Jacopo di Dondi was a clockmaker who'd built the earliest tower clock in Padua in 1344. ![]() Yet not till 1364 did an Italian clock-maker named Giovanni di Dondi write a proper treatise on his craft. Mechanical clocks were clearly being made by the early 1300s. Or maybe Richard had seen one of the new clock escapement mechanisms and had not fully understood it. Was it to be a very heavy wheel with a very small spindle? Perhaps the idea had yet to be worked out. Richard leaves us to wonder how they made a wheel unwind just one revolution in a day. Then a lead weight should be hung from the axis of the wheel, so that it would complete one revolution from sunrise to sunrise. The method of making such a clock would be this, that a man make a disc of uniform weight. ![]() In 1271, a writer called Richard the Englishman issued a tantalizing report: Clockmakers are trying to make a wheel which will make one complete revolution for every equinoctial circle. Not exactly a clock, though that's what the face of your clock really does today. And in the mid-13th century they started thinking about machines that could point at the moving sun throughout the day. Medieval inventors turned their optimism into a sun spray of creativity: They made Gothic cathedrals, fully-evolved manuscript books, crossbows, eyeglasses, water-power systems. When Newton changed we to I, it turned from a remark about possibility into a boast about his own accomplishments. In a burst of intellectual optimism Gilbert of Tournay cried, "The truth is open to all, for it is not yet totally possessed." Bernard of Chartres said, "We are as dwarfs mounted on the shoulders of giants." That was six hundred years before Newton changed it slightly. Historian Jean Gimpel describes the free-wheeling medieval view of invention that finally gave us mechanical clocks: Dante had to've been touched by the rhythmic escapement mechanism and turning gears of the new mechanical clocks. Sends out a tinkling sound, of note so sweet. He said : As clock, that calleth up the spouse of God. One hint was dropped by the poet Dante in the early 1300s. Old manuscripts start hinting at them in the late 1200s, but we find no clear picture of a clock until a century later. I've remarked before how hard it is to date the first mechanical clocks. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. ![]()
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