Galileo and the Pendulum Clock

Abstract

Although Galileo’s achievements are most frequently thought of as purely intellectual or scholarly, this is not a complete picture.¹ Galileo united technological competence with scholarship. He bridged the worlds of manual and intellectual labor, and he united the traditions of workshop and university. He was the most illustrious member of the newly emerging class of scientist-engineers that formed in Italy in the 16th century. Galileo made great contributions to physics, astronomy, and applied mathematics. It is not for nothing that he is regarded as the founder of modern science. Additionally he made contributions to philosophy² and theology.³ However Galileo also had a lifelong engagement with technology and its utilization in personal and commercial life. He developed the prototypes of many scientific instruments—the pulsilogium, thermoscope, military and geometrical compass, lodestone, telescope—and he drew a plan for the first pendulum clock. When these instruments were refined by others, they brought about the precision and objectivity of measurement that characterized the European scientific revolution.⁴