Who built the first pendulum clock?
Although the Italian inventor Galileo Galilei studied the motion of pendulums in 1592, and actually designed a pendulum clock, he never built one. It was not until 1656 that the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens built a working clock regulated by a freely swinging pendulum. Huygens’ pendulum clock was revolutionary. Its error was less than one minute per day, and later refinements brought the accuracy within ten seconds per day. Improvements continued over the next century, including compensation for temperature changes and other environmental error sources. The most accurate pendulum clocks now keep time to within one hundredth of a second per day. Pendulum clocks were the most accurate timekeepers until the development of the electronic quartz oscillator in the 1930s.
