Proceedings of the Polytechnic Association. 1053 



youth — a dreamer. By and by his attention is attracted to a lamp 

 suspended from the ceiling, which having been lighted and let go, is 

 s\Ying to and fro before him. To while away the time he lazily 

 places his finger on liis pulse and makes a comparison between them. 

 He observes that the oscillations of tlie lamp are regular in their 

 changes, and as they die away he is astonished to find that the short 

 ones are made in same time as the long, in other words, that oscilla- 

 tions are performed in equal times. The student now awakes to a 

 new life ! • A thought has been kindled that shall burn in his soul ; 

 an inspiration has dawned that shall make him immortal ! lie knows 

 not that the Arabians had used the pendulum for at least five centu- 

 ries, and luckily for him, since the vision might then have faded from 

 his mind, like the labric of a dream. The first use he made of his 

 discovery was to test the rate and variations of the human pulse, and 

 he soon found that the shorter the pendulum the quicker the vibra- 

 tions, lie wrote a treatise explaining its principles ; and it is s;tid, 

 that he suggested its use on clocks, but we have no positive proof 

 touching this point. 



Who made the first application of the pendulum to a clock it is 

 very difficult to decide. We have the advertisement of Ahasuerus 

 Fromenteil, dated November 25, 1668, wherein he claims to have the 

 first pendulum clocks made in England, and adds, "you may have 

 them at the sign of the Maremaid in Lothbnry, near Bartholomew 

 lane end, London." Formenteil was a German, and must give v.-ay 

 to that distinguished Hollander, Christian Huyghens, who adapted a 

 pendulum to a clock in 1657, and made other improvements in hor- 

 ology. The Italians claim that the son of the great Galileo put up a 

 pendulum clock in Yenice in the year 1649 ; the English, that Eich- 

 ard Harris built a clock for St. Pauls, Convent Garden, London, in 

 1642, and it had a pendulum. But first of all comes the story of 

 poor Tycho Brahe, the great astronomer, "who was persecuted and 

 driven from his observatory and home on the little island of Huen ; 

 how he went to Copenhagen, where the same blind infatuation fol- 

 lowed him ; and how he again fled to Prague, where he found protec- 

 tion under the Emperor Kudolphus, w^ho gave him a pension and a 

 castle to reside in. Here he pursued his labors in peace, and here he 

 used in his observations a pendulum clock made by Justus Borgen, 

 clockmaker to the Emperor. Tycho Brahe died in 1601. 



All of these clocks had the crown wdieel and verge escapement 

 with short and light pendulums and large arc of vibration, conse- 



