Christiaan Huygens and the pendulum clock

Tell me the steps

The scientific revolution was a momentous period. Most historians of science agree that around this time - 1500 to 1700 CE - people began to think differently, more scientifically, about how the world worked. Many began to think of the world as an orderly machine, one in which laws and rules controlled the workings of nature. Although scientists, or natural philosophers as they were then called, didn't necessarily know exactly what these laws were, they were certain they were there, working behind the scenes.

The superstars of the Scientific Revolution were Galileo, Copernicus and Newton, but there were also a number of other important thinkers: Robert Boyle, Johannes Kepler and René Descartes, to name a few. The great Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens is often forgotten among the crowd of luminaries. Huygens first made sense of Saturn's rings; discovered Titan, the largest moon in the solar system; laid the foundations of Isaac Newton's physics; and designed and built one of the first vacuum pumps (see my article "Robert Boyle and the Air Pump" in Make: Volume 78.) But arguably his most important and practical invention was the clock pendulum.

During the time of Huygens, from 1629 to 1695, clocks were becoming more and more important in everyday life, but they were very inaccurate. The best of them couldn't do better than gain or lose more than 15 minutes of time each day. While such a clock could tell you when it was time for lunch, it was not suitable for navigation or astronomical observations.

Inspired by Galileo Galilei's research on pendulums some 75 years earlier, Huygens began thinking about how he could use pendulums to better keep time. Huygens knew that Galileo had discovered that pendulums had a fascinating property: they were isochronous, which means that the time it takes for a pendulum to swing back and forth is the same no matter how high the pendulum's starting point is. 'oscillation. This made them useful for keeping time because for a given pendulum length the time interval for swinging back and forth is always the same. When Huygens replaced the imprecise pendulum used until then with the constant-speed pendulum, the error rate of a Huygens pendulum clock went from 15 minutes per day to 15 seconds per day! This was indeed a scientific revolution in timing.

Portrait of Christiaan Huygens (1629 - 1695) Dutch physicist, mathematician, astronomer and inventor

In this edition of Remaking History we recreate a Huygens style pendulum clock escapement. An escapement is the heart of any non-electronic clock. This is the mechanism that goes "ticking" and keeps time. Because Huygens' original clock requires precision-cut gears that are difficult to manufacture, we will instead build a simpler descendant called a single-pin escapement clock. The single-pin escapement isn't widely used by watchmakers, but it certainly keeps time, is easy to build, and makes a loud, satisfying ticking sound when you operate it.

1.

Next

Build your exhaust frame by joining the 2x4 and 2x2 boards as shown in Fig.