French clockmakers, on the other hand, took full advantage of the luxury trade that flourished in Paris, providing domestic clocks in splendid cases, ranging from products of cabinetmakers such as Boulle in the early part of the period to the cooperative efforts of bronze founders, porcelain makers, and marble cutters, which began to predominate before the middle of the eighteenth century. Technical advances and superb workmanship combined to place England at the forefront of clockmaking in the latter part of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century, so much so that in 1711, in order to protect the French trade, King Louis XIV banned the importation of English clocks into France. John Arnold (1735–1799) and Thomas Earnshaw (1749–1829) managed to make chronometers in sufficient quantities and at moderate prices so that by the early nineteenth century the chronometer had become a standard instrument of navigation. 4, proved that it was possible to solve the age-old problem of finding the longitude at sea by the use of an accurate timekeeper. John Harrison’s (1693–1776) chronometer, familiarly known as H. Tompion had, in fact, made two year-going clocks with 13-foot pendulums for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, that were finished in 1676. All these features are present in a longcase clock ( 1999.48.2) of about 1677–80 by Thomas Tompion (1639–1713).īy the end of the seventeenth century, clocks were accurate enough to be used for serious astronomical observation. The problem of making a case to stand on the floor to protect the long pendulum as well as the weights of a domestic clock was solved in the course of the seventeenth-century evolution of the longcase-or, more popularly, the grandfather clock. A weight at the bottom of the pendulum in the form of a double-sided convex disk was found to offer the least resistance to the air. The standard solution proved to be the anchor escapement regulated by a pendulum of slightly more than 39 inches in length, giving a beat of one second and allowing seconds to be recorded on the dial of a clock without the use of complicated gearing. A new escapement had to be found to help shorten the arc, as well as to diminish the retarding effect that the older verge escapement had on the pendulum. First, the pendulum had to be lengthened and the arc of its swing reduced. There were a number of practical problems, however, in making the pendulum the truly accurate timekeeper it was to become. It remained for the English to complete this development. By that time, English and French clockmakers had already put the pendulum to use, permanently changing the technology of clocks. A domestic clock ( 58.53) with a short pendulum probably made by Isaac or perhaps by his son Jacques III Thuret (1669–1738), with a magnificent case and pedestal by André Charles Boulle (1642–1732), made about a quarter of a century later, is in the Museum’s collection.Īlthough Huygens published his idea for a precision pendulum in a small booklet titled Horologium in 1658, he did not produce the full theory of the pendulum for the scientific world until the 1673 publication Horologium Oscillatorium: sive, De motu Pendulorum. Now in the collection of the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden, the clock was, according to tradition, the personal possession of Huygens, and it is the oldest preserved astronomical regulator. The Museum’s hooded wall clock ( 1974.28.93) of about 1660–65 by Ahasuerus I Fromanteel (1607–1693), the father of John, is a fine example of an English clock with a traditional verge escapement, now regulated by the newly developed short pendulum derived from Huygens’ invention.Ībout 1670, Isaac II Thuret (1630–1706), clockmaker to the French king Louis XIV, made a pendulum clock with a dial that indicated hours, minutes, and seconds. The Fromanteels, a prominent family of London clockmakers, sent a family member John (1638–1692) to become a journeyman in Coster’s workshop, and by November 1658, the Fromanteels were able to advertise their pendulum clocks in London. A year later, Salomon Coster (died 1659) of the Hague obtained exclusive patent rights for making Huygens’ pendulum clocks in the Netherlands. Huygens’ first version of the pendulum was invented toward the end of 1656. The principle was discovered in Italy by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), but for the practical purposes of European clockmaking, the development of the pendulum began with the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695). The great advantage of the pendulum for controlling the escapement of a clock is that, unlike earlier controlling devices, the freely swinging pendulum has a definite period of its own. The adoption of the pendulum in the seventeenth century radically changed the European clock.
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