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Re: Big Ben...

Another example:

When I was in grad school, I taught intro astronomy labs for a while
and we had an old sidereal clock that used to be in the observatory.
It used an extremely clever mechanism for maintaining very accurate
times -- a pendulum partially filled with mercury. The idea was that
if the temperature changed, causing the pendulum to expand thermally
and lengthen the period, the mercury level would rise for the same
reason and at least partially compensate.


Your question reminds me of what I call my college--actually the
Jesuit Novitiate and Juniorate at St Andrew-on-Hudson, just north
of Poughkeepsie, New York, in Hyde Park. (Now it's the
Culinary Institute of America.) At any rate the large bells and
all the solenoid driven electric clocks in the building (dating
from 1905) were controlled by a pendulum in the attic. We students
were all assigned jobs and took care of just about everyting....
including the clocks. We added bee-bees to change the period of
the pendulum.... I always took it for granted that we were changing
the effective length of this physical pendulum by altering the
center of gravity of the bob. This had to be done twice a year
because of the extreme difference in temperature in the attic
in winter and summer, which also presumably changed the effective
length of the pendulum.

Bob Curtis
_____
Robert Kern Curtis Hackensack, New Jersey
bcurtis@email.njin.net rkc1@village.ios.com
Home Page: http://village.ios.com/~rkc1/rkc.shtml
Hackensack H S page: http://village.ios.com/~rkc1/hhs.shtml




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Assistant Professor of Physics consists not only of unity
Coastal Carolina University in variety but also of
Conway, SC 29528 variety in unity.
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