The Pendulum Clock and Precise Time

Mechanical clocks had appeared in European towers by the late thirteenth century, but they often drifted by many minutes a day. Galileo noticed that a pendulum of a given length swings at an almost regular rate, and in 1656 the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens built the first pendulum clock, patenting it in 1657. Accuracy improved dramatically, from an error of roughly a quarter of an hour a day to around fifteen seconds. Precise clocks changed science, because astronomers and experimenters could now time events reliably.

They also changed society over the following centuries: work, prayer, trade and later factories and railways were increasingly organised by the clock rather than by the sun or the seasons. Historians such as E. P. Thompson argued that industrial 'time discipline' was a major cultural shift, showing how a measuring tool can reshape daily habits and power relations between employers and workers.