Pendulum

A body suspended from a fixed point or axis that swings under gravity. Its motion provides a classic example of periodic motion and can regulate clocks.

Simple pendulum: An idealized pendulum consisting of a point mass suspended by a massless, inextensible string. This model isolates the forces governing a pendulum’s motion.
Escapement: A mechanism that releases a clock’s gear train in controlled increments. The escapement sustains a clock pendulum while counting its swings.
Galileo Galilei: An Italian scientist who helped establish mathematical and experimental approaches to studying motion. His observations of swinging lamps helped inspire investigations of pendulum timing.
Spring–mass system: An oscillator in which a mass moves under the restoring force of a spring. Its restoring force comes from elastic deformation rather than gravity acting along an arc.
Pendulum period: The time a pendulum takes to complete one full oscillation. Its dependence on length and gravity explains a pendulum’s regular timing.
Foucault pendulum: A long pendulum whose changing swing plane demonstrates Earth’s rotation. Its motion makes the rotation of the ground observable.
Christiaan Huygens: A Dutch mathematician and scientist who developed the pendulum clock and studied its motion. His 1656 clock applied the pendulum to accurate timekeeping.
Torsion pendulum: An oscillator that twists a suspended body against a wire’s restoring torque. It oscillates through twisting, not the gravity-driven swing of an ordinary pendulum.
Simple harmonic motion: Periodic motion in which restoring force is proportional to displacement and directed toward equilibrium. A pendulum approximates this motion when its swings are small.
Gravimeter: An instrument that measures local gravitational acceleration or variations in gravity. Pendulum timing can reveal differences in gravitational acceleration.

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