![]() Edward Waas, Jefferson Street, Ravenna, Ohio, had promised to give our society the Court House Clock which he purchased for $400 from the contractor who tore down the Portage County Court Houses. ![]() We need a similar effort now to save the clock for future generations.īefore his death in 1970, Mr. The story of how the tower was constructed, below, is a tale of community cooperation and generosity. To gain a further understanding of how much alike the Seth Thomas #18 is to the clock that powers Big Ben, please see the movie below. Big Ben became fully operational in 1859. To design Big Ben, teams of competing engineers worked for six years until the Astronomer Royal awarded the contract to Edmund Denison whose design was something that until that time was considered impossible: accuracy within a second an hour. The escapement that this clock uses was designed for what at the time was the most accurate clock in the world: Big Ben. Gallileo Galilei is credited with having developed the physics of a swinging pendulum, in the 16th century. It can be very closely adjusted within a few seconds a month. This momentary halt is about one second and can be adjusted by shortening or lengthening the pendulum. Because the pallets are angled, they slide apart and the bracket is "pushed," thus pushing the roller, giving the pendulum its impulse. This contact is the "tick" sound heard as the clock runs. As the arms rotate, the arm pallets alternately strike the pallets on their respective brackets and momentarily stop the clock movement. Six rotating arms (two sets of three) also have pallets at their tips. Each bracket has a flat tab attached to it called a pallet. The rollers are each attached to brass brackets. They straddle the top end of the pendulum rod, giving it the impulse needed to keep it swinging in its two-second beat. The part of the clock that makes it keep time, or regulates it, is the escapement, which ends in the two ivory rollers in the lower part of the picture.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |