Pendulum clocks

Moving timepieces with style

The pendulum clock

The term pendulum clock comes from the French pendule, which means pendulum or pendulum clock. In French, however, pendule is also synonymous with watch in general. Technically, a pendulum clock is a mechanical wheel clock that has a pendulum as a regulator. Due to this mechanism, a pendulum clock must be stationary. There are both table, wall and large floor grandfather clocks with pendulum.

How it works and a little history of the pendulum clock

A pendulum consists of a suspension, rod, lens and regulating device. In 1583, Galileo Galilei was the first to find out that a free-swinging pendulum always takes the same amount of time to oscillate, regardless of the amplitude of oscillation. This property of the pendulum of the simultaneous oscillation period is also called the pendulum law. It is precisely because of this property that the pendulum is the ideal regulator of a stationary watch. In 1656, the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens discovered the same law independently of Galileo's findings. It was also Huygens who made the pendulum set useful for watchmaking. Thus, he revolutionized watchmaking. The pendulum clocks were far superior to the other clocks at the time with their high accuracy. This is an advantage that even today contributes to a very high accuracy of less than 0.004 seconds of daily movement in precision pendulum clocks.