11/13/2022 0 Comments Who invented the clock![]() The culprit is indeed small vibrations: as the pendulums swing, the clocks exert tiny forces on the beam that connects them. In 2000, Georgia Tech physicists conducted experiments and found that Huygens’ intuition on this score was correct. Huygens suggested that this effect was due to “imperceptible movements” in the wooden beams supporting the clocks. He hoped to exploit this effect to solve the longitude problem, thinking two such clocks could regulate each other, but the Royal Society by then had lost faith in pendulum clocks as a possible solution. (Wide swings took slightly longer than narrow swings.) He also described coupled oscillation-what he called “an odd kind of sympathy”-having noticed, while bedridden by a brief illness, that when he placed two pendulum clocks next to each other, they would synchronize and start swinging in opposite directions. In it, he described various related phenomena such as the fact that the periods of pendulums depended on their width of swing. In 1673, he published a seminal treatise of all his work on pendulums, the Horologium Oscillatorium. He built several pendulum clocks for this purpose, which were duly tested at sea in 16, with mixed results. Huygens’ own attempts at such a design weren’t sufficiently accurate, but he believed he could adapt his pendulum device to resolve the problem. The English scientist Robert Hooke, for instance, was experimenting with a spring-regulated clock. Further improvements increased that accuracy, so much so that pendulum clocks dominated the timekeeping sector for hundreds of years, until the invention of the quartz clock in 1927.Īlso around this time, the scientific community was deeply engaged in grappling with the problem of measuring longitude at sea. (He also designed a pocket watch in 1675.) His designs proved far more accurate at keeping time than the basic spring-driven table clocks of the era, with a drift of only fifteen seconds per day versus fifteen minutes for other forms of timekeeping. Huygen completed a prototype of his first pendulum clock by the end of 1656, and hired a local clockmaker named Salomon Coster to construct others. He was also intrigued by Galileo’s discovery of isochronism (pendulums of the same length have the same oscillation period). His interest in astronomy led him to the precise measurement of time, since it was so crucial to his observations. He discovered the first moon of Saturn in 1655, and in 1659 he was able to determine the true shape of the rings around the planet, although his findings were disputed for the next ten years, until continued improvements in telescopes finally convinced the remaining skeptical astronomers. He came up with an improved method for grinding and polishing lenses for telescopes, and designed his own eyepiece, using his upgraded instruments to scan the skies at night. Huygen’s interests soon turned to astronomy. His early publications on mathematics earned him a solid reputation in Europe, and he traveled to Paris for the first time in 1655, easily finding a place in the best social and intellectual circles there. WHO INVENTED THE CLOCK FREEBut eventually his father realized he had no interest in such a career, and this, combined with a shift in the political winds, left Christiaan free to devote himself full-time to research at his father’s house in The Hague. Huygens Senior hoped his son would follow in his footsteps and become a diplomat, and the young man did travel to Denmark in 1649 on a diplomatic mission. Huygens next studied mathematics and law for two years at the University of Leiden, before matriculating at the nascent College of Orange in Breda, completing his studies in 1649. Young Christiaan was largely home-schooled as a child by private tutors, showing aptitude for math, mechanics, and drawing, and none other than Rene Descartes-a frequent visitor to the house at the time-praised his skill at geometry. Huygens was born in 1629 in The Hague, Netherlands, to a wealthy and influential family his father, Constantijn, was a diplomat with many useful connections in government, science, and intellectual circles. He became the first to report the phenomenon of coupled oscillation in two pendulum clocks (which he invented) in his bedroom while recovering from an illness in 1665. Such was the case with 17th century Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens. Being bedridden is never much fun, but sometimes it can lead to scientific insight. ![]()
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