Up until about the 16th Century, time keeping was approximate at best. There were the beginnings of mechanical clocks that would sit in the homes of the wealthy or in the towers of churches, but they would start to slow in their time keeping — up to one-half hour per day — as the mechanical mechanisms would slowly wind down. It was at about this time that a young Galileo observed that the chandeliers of the church would sway in perfect rhythm moving from one spot to another quite methodically.
Galileos observations led him to start measuring the sway of the chandeliers against his own pulse. When he did this he saw that movement was consistent. He also observed that the relative timing remained the same even if the sway was large or small. Thus we have what many consider as being the first observations that a pendulum clock could accurately keep time.
It was discovered that there were variances in the timekeeping based on the pattern of the swinging, if not its distance. The swaying pendulum was then fashioned so that it could keep a swinging pattern with a curve that is called a cycloid.
In 1656 the first truly accurate pendulum clock was...
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