Believe it or not, the idea of hanging a clock on the wall was not merely the product of some clever decorator but arose out of necessity. The earliest mechanical clocks ran on springs, but springs were notoriously inaccurate because they ran at different speeds and tended had to be kept regularly wound. It was not until the invention of the pendulum that clocks became efficient enough to be useful, but pendulums require space in which to swing, thus the origin of the wall clock.
The famous Galileo, best known for determining that the Earth rotated around the Sun and not the other way around, was the first to invent the pendulum and began constructing one, but died before it was completed. A few years later, the Dutch natural philosopher Christian Huygens invented the first effective pendulum clock, based on Galileo’s earlier work, and patented it in 1657. This invention made clocks vastly more effective, cutting down the amount of inaccuracy from some fifteen minutes a day using a spring-driven clock down to some fifteen seconds a day using pendulum-driven ones.
The problem with pendulum clocks is that they require a lot of space so that the pendulum can swing freely. This was especially true of the original pendulum clocks in the seventeenth century whose swing was enormous, covering a one hundred degree angle. By about 1670 it had been discovered that these enormous swings in fact reduced the efficiency of the clocks so new mechanisms were invented allowing the same process to work, just with smaller pendulums swings at much smaller angles. This was more or less the beginning of the original pendulum clocks that are still used today and why these clocks were hung on the wall.
The popularity of pendulum driven clocks took off quickly. The improved accuracy allowed for the wide addition of minute hands to the clocks, which were largely meaningless using the older spring-driven clocks. Further, by 1680, the second hand was added, but in order to be accurate it required a pendulum of about a meter in length (about one yard), but since the swing was very small, this long pendulum could be encased, leading to the rise of standing grandfather clocks. By the beginning of the seventeenth century all of these new developments had taken place and having both wall clocks and free standing grandfather clocks became fashionable among the wealthy and those with a scientific inclination. Less than forty years after its invention, the pendulum clock had spawned a full blown, and successful, industry that continues to this day.
By the 1930s, when battery-driven electric clocks became the norm (although they were invented almost a century before), the pendulum clock remained the standard for home clocks of all types. Although legitimate pendulum clocks are still readily available, many inexpensive clocks today with pendulums are actually battery-driven electric ones with the pendulum added for aesthetic purposes only.
Related Posts:
Tags: Christian Huygens, clock, invention, mechanical clocks, natural philosopher, pendulum, pendulum clock, swing, wall, Wall Clock
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.