Josh Clark

He developed a clock.

He never built it because he kept being called away by the indigo girls to help them get through life.

So he wasn't able to build it.

His son started to build it, but as Galileo always said, that boy never finished anything that he started, so he didn't complete it.

And finally, in 1656...

The Dutch mathematician Christian Huygens, the son Galileo always wanted, he ended up creating that clock, the first pendulum clock that Galileo had kind of come up with.

Yeah, that was in 1656.

And almost right after that, there was an English scientist named Robert Hooke with an E at the end said, you know what, I can make that thing better.

And he replaced the verge that we mentioned earlier with something called an anchor escapement, which was just a new mechanism to regulate the swing, I guess.

But that allowed the arc of the pendulum to be reduced from about a 100-degree swing to 4 to 6 degrees, which, again, meant you could pack it in a packageable size.

Yeah.

And also they found that less of a swing, they found that the less wide the arc, the more accurate the timekeeping was.

Anchor escapements are almost impossible to explain unless you see it actually happening.

And then you're like, oh, okay, that totally makes sense.

But I say go look up a video of how anchor escapements work because it's pretty amazing.

And so because you have slower moving pendulums, they require less power, which means you need less weight.

And eventually there was a guy named William Clement who put all of this stuff together and in 1680 came up with what we now call grandfather clocks.

And because of everything that had kind of developed from Galileo on, Clement was able to add a minute hand.

And now all of a sudden, you knew what minute it was of the hour, thanks to William Clement.

That's right.