Clocks remind us that the ‘tempus fugit’, or what is the same, that this succession of days and nights is getting out of hand. During the 18th and 19th centuries, pendulum clocks -called regulators- were present in homes, factories and railway stations, they were the inescapable reference for scheduling work shifts, public transport and life in general. And it is that somehow, the pendulum clock set the pace of the Industrial Revolution.
The pendulum clock had been invented, however, much earlier, in 1656. That year the Dutch scientist Christian Huygens (1629-1695) -the discoverer of the Orion nebula- was the first to patent it for measuring time. The Dutch mathematician and astronomer hired the services of a watchmaker, Salomon Coster, who actually built the first pendulum clock.
Salomon signed his designs with the mark ‘Samuel Coster Haghe met privilege’ (Samuel Coster of The Hague with privilege) implying that Huygens had authorized him to build such watches. The oldest existing pendulum clock is signed by Salomon Coster, it is located in the Boerhaave Museum (Leiden, the Netherlands) and dates from the year 1657.
cat guts
Shortly after the invention, John Fromanteel, son of a London watchmaker, learned how to make pendulum clocks from Coster and licensed their production, quickly improving both the design and the level of precision.
The first watches used strings made from cat guts, whose elasticity was used as a driving force; later they were replaced by a flat steel chain and, later, by a spiral spring.
In any case, to be honest with the truth, it was Galileo Galilei, at the beginning of the 17th century, who had laid the scientific foundations for the pendulum clock. It was this Italian scientist who studied isochronism and who tried to put it into practice.
Due to his blindness, he had to entrust the project to his son Vicenzo in 1641, and his death, just a year later, left the project in dry dock.
An empire of more than 250 years
The introduction of the pendulum clock marked a turning point in precision for measuring time, since the error went from about 15 minutes a day to barely 15 seconds a day.
The components of the pendulum clock are basically four: the pendulum itself, a face that shows the time, a weight attached to a rope that turns a pulley, and an escapement mechanism, which provides timed impulses to keep the pendulum swinging.
It is precisely the escapement mechanism, by locking and unlocking the gear train, that generates the characteristic ticking sound so associated with this type of watch.
Pendulum clocks use an oscillating weight to measure time because their swing cycles occur at equal time intervals, which depend solely on length. For this reason it is very important that they remain in a fixed position, since any acceleration -positive or negative- translates into inaccuracies in its operation.
The need to time with greater precision led to the development of increasingly precise pendulum clocks, until the birth of the so-called astronomical regulators, which were installed in naval observatories and used to set marine chronometers.
For more than 250 years, pendulum clocks were the world standard for precise timing, and it was not until 1927, with the invention of the quartz clock, that they faded into the background. That invention marked the end of his empire.