Month: January 2014

An original escapement design?

© Trustees of the British Museum[source page] On a recent visit to the British Museum in London, I was interested to see a very curious escapement mechanism in one of the clocks, a creation of Thomas Tompion in the 1670s. I am certainly no expert on clocks, but I had never seen an escapement where the pendulum swings across the plane of the gear wheels. Frustratingly, the actual mechanism was very small, and in the middle of quite a large glass case, so I could not see it well enough to work out what it was doing. I spent a bit of time thinking about it, and came up with an idea for what might be happening, but now the

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