First pendulum clock design

The Italian physicist, mathematician and astronomer Galileo Galilei (Italy, 1564–1642) was among the first to recognise that a pendulum’s predictable and uniform swing had great potential for timekeeping. Records from the mid-1630’s show that Galileo had developed a device with a pendulum to time astronomical observations, but there is no evidence to suggest that this was in fact a mechanical clock. In 1658, Christiaan Huygens published Horologium, in which he described the first fully operational pendulum clock and credited Galileo for the initial concept.

According to an account by Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo’s student and first biographer, Galileo developed a design for a pendulum clock in around 1641 with his son Vincenzio, who only partially constructed a model of this design after his father’s death. However, it wasn’t until 1659 that Viviani described this account and made a sketch of the incomplete design, one year after the publication of Huygen’s Horologium.