| | European Clocks in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Special Topics Page Timeline of Art History The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
 | | 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. |
| | Often found in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century clocks with long pendulums, the device consists of a flat, toothed wheel mounted at the end of the going train of a clock and a separate, semicircular piece of steel with pallets at each end of the semicircle that somewhat resembles a sea anchor. |
| www.metmuseum.org /toah/hd/clck/hd_clck.htm (1606 words) |
