Edmund Beckett, Henry Hardinge Cunynghame, and James George Joseph Penderel-Brodhurst

“ If the escapement forms the termination of a clock-train impelled by a weight, the driving force of the escapement is apt to vary according to the friction of the wheels, while every change in temperature causes a difference in the thickness of the oil. It is therefore desirable, if possible, to secure uniformity of impulse—say, by causing the train of wheels to lift up a certain specified weight, and let it drop on the pendulum at regular intervals, or by some equivalent method. ”

“ By taking in all the sources of error of higher orders, it has been possible to calculate a pendulum so accurately that, when the clock is loaded with the weight sufficient to give the pendulum the arc of swing for which it is designed, a rate of error has been produced of only half a minute in a year. ”

“ Church and Turret Clocks.—Seeing that a clock—at least the going part of it—is a machine in which the only work to be done is the overcoming of its own friction and the resistance of the air, it is evident that when the friction and resistance are much increased it may become necessary to resort to expedients for neutralizing their effects, which are not required in a smaller machine with less friction. In a turret clock the friction is enormously increased by the great weight of all the parts ”

“ Besides, if the clock has work to do of a varying amount—as when the hands of a turret clock are acted on by a heavy wind pressure tending sometimes to retard them, sometimes to drive them on—then it is clear that the impulses given by the scape-wheel to the pendulum may be very unequal, and that the arc of vibration of the pendulum may thus be seriously affected and its isochronism disturbed. ”

“ Hence the future of the clock seems to be a series of master-clocks, electrically driven, and synchronized one with another, in various parts of a city, from each of which a number of dials in the vicinity are driven. Electrical synchronization was worked out by Louis Bréguet and others, and a successful system was perfected in England by J. A. Lund. The leading principle of the best systems is at each hour to cause a pair of fingers or some equivalent device to close upon the minute hand and put it exactly to the hour. ”

“ In the commoner kind of turret clocks a more simple apparatus is used, which goes by the name of the bolt and shutter, because it consists of a weighted lever with a broad end, which shuts up the winding-hole. When it is lifted a spring-bolt attached to the lever, or its arbor, runs into the teeth of one of the wheels, and the weight of the lever keeps the train going until the bolt has run itself out of gear. Clocks are not always driven by weights. ”

“ Clocks have been made with a sort of balance wheel consisting of a thread with a ball at the end which winds backwards and forwards spirally round a rod. In others a swing or see-saw is attached to the pendulum, or a ship under canvas is made to oscillate in a heavy sea. In others the time is measured by the fall of a ball down an inclined plane, the time of fall being given by the formula t=√ (2s/g sin a) , where s is the length of the incline and a the inclination. But friction so modifies the result as to render experiment the only mode of adjusting such a clock. ”

“ The effect of some escapements is not only to counteract the circular error, or the natural increase of the time of a pendulum as the arc increases, but to over-balance it by an error of the contrary kind. The recoil escapement does so; for it is almost invariably found that whatever may be the shape of these pallets, the clock loses as the arc of the pendulum falls off, and vice versa. ”

“ Going Barrels.—A clock which is capable of going accurately must have some contrivance to keep it going while it is being wound up. In the old-fashioned house clocks, which were wound up by merely pulling one of the strings, and in which one such winding served for both the going and striking parts, this was done by what is called the endless chain of Huygens, which consists of a string or chain with the ends joined together, and passing over two pulleys on the arbors of the great wheels, with deep grooves and spikes in them, to prevent the chain from slipping. ”

“ Huygens proposed to apply his discovery to clocks, and since the evolute of a cycloid is an equal cycloid, he suggested the use of a flexible pendulum swinging between cycloidal cheeks. But this was only an example of theory pushed too far, because the friction on the cycloidal cheeks involves more error than they correct, and other disturbances of a higher degree of importance are left uncorrected. In fact the application of pendulums to clocks, though governed in the abstract by theory, has to be modified by experiment. ”

“ Or again, if a mercury surface be simply touched with a pin, the slight sparking that is produced on making the current will soon form a little pile of dirty oxide at the point of entry, and the contact will frequently fail. If it be necessary to have a mercury contact, the pin must be well driven in below the surface of the mercury or else swept through it as an oar is swept through the water. Another form of electrical contact that acts well is a knife edge brought into contact with a series of fine elastic strips of metal laid parallel to one another like the fingers of a hand. ”

“ But as the axis of the earth slowly revolves round in a cone, whereby the phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes is produced, it follows that the astronomical sidereal day is not the true period of the earth’s rotation on its axis, but varies from it by less than a twenty millionth part, a fraction so small as to be inappreciable. But the civil day depends not on the revolution of the earth with regard to the stars, but on its revolution as compared with the position of the sun. ”

“ The dead faces are portions of circles (not necessarily of the same circle) , having the axis of the pallets C for their centre; and the consequence evidently is, that as the pendulum goes on, carrying the pallet still nearer to the wheel than the position in which a tooth falls on to the corner A or B of the impulse and the dead faces, the tooth still rests on the dead faces without any recoil, until the pendulum returns and lets the tooth slide down the impulse face, giving the impulse to the pendulum as it goes. ”

“ It is the neutral point which it is desirable to arrange for, and only trial and experience can so fit the shape and size of the pallets, scape-wheel and clock weight to one another, as to secure that a moderate variation of the driving power neither accelerates nor retards the motion of the pendulum, while at the same time such an arc of vibration is secured as shall be least subject to barometric error, and not have too great a circular error. ”

“ The depth of mercury required in an iron jar is stated by Lord Grimthorpe to be 81/2 to 9 in. The reason why it is greater than it is when a glass jar is employed is that iron has a larger coefficient of expansion than glass, and that it is also heavier. In all cases, however, of mercury pendulums experiment seems to be the only ultimate test of the quantity of mercury required, for the results are so complicated by the behaviour of the oil and the barometric errors that at its best the regulation of a clock can only be ultimately a matter of scientifically guided compromise. ”

“ Care has to be taken that the pushes of the pall do not cause the ratchet wheel to be impelled too far. The anchor escapement of a common grandfather’s clock can be made to drive the works by means of an electromagnet, the pendulum being removed. With a common anchor escapement the scape-wheel can be driven round by wagging the anchor to and fro. All then that is necessary is to fix a piece of iron on the anchor so that its weight pulls the anchor over one way, while an electromagnet pulls the iron the other. ”

“ Since the summer and winter temperatures of a room may differ by as much as 50° F., the going of a clock may thus be affected by an error of 12 seconds a day. With a pendulum rod of brass, which has a coefficient of expansion of ·00001, a clock might gain one-third of a minute daily in winter as compared with its rate in summer. ”

“ The best way to manage the banking is to make the beat-pins long enough to reach a little way behind the pendulum, and let the banking be a thin plate of any metal screwed adjustably to the back of the case. ”

“ A very useful form of the dead escapement, which is adopted in many of the best turret clocks, is called the “pin-wheel escapement.” Fig. 10 will sufficiently explain its action and construction. Its advantages are—that it does not require so much accuracy as the other; if a pin gets broken it is easily replaced, whereas in the other the wheel is ruined if the point of a tooth is injured; a wheel of given size will work with more pins than teeth, and therefore a train of less velocity will do, and that sometimes amounts to a saving of one wheel in the train, and a good deal of friction ”

“ Clocks are also constructed with conical pendulums. It is a property of the conical pendulum that if swung round, the time of one complete revolution is the same as that of the double vibration of a pendulum equal in length to the vertical distance of the bob of the conical pendulum below its point of support. It follows that if the driving force of such a pendulum can be kept constant (as it easily can by an electric contact which is made at every revolution during which it falls below a certain point) the clock will keep time ”

“ The duration of the contact is just that necessary to accomplish the work which has to be done, and it is remarkable that when used to operate large circuits of electrically propelled dials the duration accommodates itself to their exact requirements and the varying conditions of battery and self-induction. The ratchet wheel F is usually mounted loosely upon its arbor and is connected to the wheel C by means of a spiral spring, which in conjunction with the back-stop click P maintains the turning force on the wheelwork at the instant when the lever D is being raised. ”

“ One master-clock in the cellar will drive a hundred or so placed over the building. The master-clock may itself be driven by electricity, but it will require the services from time to time of some one to correct the time. Even this labour may be avoided if the master-clock is synchronized, and as synchronization requires but a small expenditure of force, it can be done over large areas. ”