Every mechanical clock is an argument between a falling weight and a swinging pendulum. The weight wants to spin the gear train as fast as it can; the pendulum, through the escapement, lets it advance exactly one tooth per beat. This exhibit strips the case away — a skeleton regulator — so you can watch that argument settled sixty times a minute.
The simulation runs the real kinematics: the anchor rocks with the pendulum, locks and releases the escape wheel on its dead faces, and each gear pair turns at the exact ratio its tooth counts dictate. Follow the train backwards from the escape wheel and you are reading the gearing arithmetic that turns a two-second beat into hours, minutes, and seconds.
Regulators like this one were the precision references of their day — observatory instruments that other clocks were set against. The deadbeat escapement that drives this movement was introduced by George Graham around 1715 and remained the standard for precision pendulum clocks for two centuries.
Specifications
- Movement
- Weight-driven regulator, skeleton frame
- Escapement
- Graham deadbeat, anchor and escape wheel
- Timebase
- Seconds pendulum (one beat per second)
- Simulated
- Full gear-train ratios, lock and release geometry
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