Josh Clark

And you can use those gears to keep time with.

Well, a coiled spring has a lot of kinetic energy.

And replacing the weights and clocks with coiled springs meant they became portable because, of course, humans love to make things portable.

Yeah, but they were still pretty inexact because friction is a thing.

So depending on how well it's made, how well it was lubricated, if it was hot, if it was humid, that would just change the way clocks work.

So they were still pretty inexact at this point.

So sundials were still kind of preferred.

Water clocks were still preferred for a long time and actually more precise.

If you really want to jump forward in precision,

You can look no further than Galileo Galilei and the turn of the 17th century.

And he was the one that kind of came up with this idea of a pendulum when he started measuring the movement of lamps swinging on a cord using his own pulse beat as a reference.

Pretty cool.

Yeah, so he found, like, you can use a pendulum to keep time.

The reason why is a pendulum swing is divided exactly in half time-wise, right?

So that's what's called a harmonious oscillator.

Each swing to the left or the right is the exact same amount of time.

And even more than that, when a pendulum loses energy, that doesn't change.

The arcs just get a little shorter, but they're still equal to one another, right?

Yeah.

So Galileo figured out that you could use that information to build a clock.