What is a Mechanical Clock?
One older piece of technology that has not lost popularity in today’s digital age is the mechanical clock. Our fascination with clocks lies in their mechanical complexity along with their precision. A well-crafted series of parts allows a mechanical clock to measure and display the time of day with a highly varying degree of style. These clocks began to appear around the 1500s, and have been perfected into their modern forms ever since then. The most recognizable component of a mechanical clock is its face. A standard clock face is round and consists of marks that denote the twelve hours of the day. The hands of the clock are also on the face and point to the hours, minutes and seconds to tell the specific time. Although this is the standard setup for the face of a mechanical clock, there are also a limitless amount of variations of clocks that are designed to show the time in unique and different ways. Inside a basic mechanical clock is a gear train that is designed to turn the hands
Before digital watches a clock or watch worked using “clockworks”. Clockwork just means an arrangement of real mechanical cogs, levers and springs. The main mechanical component of a clock is the escapement. Instead of an electrical battery the energy to work a clock was stored in a tightly wound spring or weights on strings, but to get the potential energy stored in the source to escape evenly, at a constant rate, a pendulum was needed. Huygens and Galileo are generally considered the inventors of the mechanical clock, having worked out that a pendulum in a constant gravitational field will always swing at rate determined only by its length. An escapement couples a pendulum to a circular cog so that the cog advances only one tooth of rotation for each swing of the pendulum. That turns a constant reciprocating motion into a constant rotational motion. There are many ingenious mechanical solutions to the escapement, including the Verge escapement, the Anchor escapement and the gravity e
