Dutch mathematician and scientist Christian Huygens invents a pendulum clock. Cuckoo clocks were made in Furtwangen, Germany, in the Black Forest region. Mathematician and astronomer James Gregory invents the first reflecting telescope. Mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton invents a reflecting telescope. The first reference to a candy cane is made. German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz invents the calculating machine. Dutch Microbiologist Anton Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to see and describe bacteria with a microscope.
Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and physicist Christian Huygens patents the pocket watch. English architect and natural philosopher Robert Hooke invents the universal joint. English inventor and engineer Thomas Savery invents a steam pump. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content.
Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Log out. US Markets Loading H M S In the news. Dylan Love. William Lee invented the knitting machine in , which played a seminal role in kicking off the industrial revolution to come. Small things were made big with Zacharias Janssen's invention of the compound microscope. The new technology, so brilliantly launched, spreads rapidly.
After the success of the clocks in Europe's cathedrals in the late 14th century, and the introduction of the clock face in places such as Wells , kings and nobles naturally want this impressive technology at home.
The first domestic clocks, in the early 15th century, are miniature versions of the cathedral clocks - powered by hanging weights, regulated by escapements with a foliot , and showing the time to the great man's family and household by means of a single hand working its way round a hour circuit on the clock's face.
But before the middle of the 15th century a development of great significance occurs, in the form of a spring-driven mechanism. The earliest surviving spring-driven clock, now in the Science Museum in London, dates from about By that time clockmakers have not only discovered how to transmit power to the mechanism from a coiled spring. They have also devised a simple but effective solution to the problem inherent in a coiled spring which steadily loses power as it uncoils.
The solution to this is the fusee. The fusee is a cone, bearing a spiral of grooves on its surface, which forms part of the axle driving the wheels of the clock mechanism. The length of gut linking the drum of the spring to the axle is wound round the fusee. It lies on the thinnest part of the cone when the spring is fully wound and reaches its broadest circumference by the time the spring is weak.
Increased leverage exactly counteracts decreasing strength. These two devices, eliminating the need for weights, make possible clocks which stand on tables, clocks which can be taken from room to room, even clocks to accompany a traveller in a carriage. Eventually, most significant of all, they make possible the pocket watch. One of the most unfortunate innovators in the history of invention is Martin Behaim, the creator of the world's first globe - made in Nuremberg in His idea is excellent.
A globe is the only accurate way of representing the surface of the earth. His misfortune is to base his globe on Ptolemy who postulates a single ocean between Spain and China and to achieve his three-dimensional version of this notion in the very year in which it is disproved - by Columbus reaching America.
But Behaim shows the reason for Columbus's confidence in sailing west. The distance on his globe between Spain and China is only half what it should be. Newton, who emerged from scholarly near-reclusiveness at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the s, to become Master of the Royal Mint assuring the reliability of English coinage , and President of the Royal Society in , now stands as a figurehead for British scientific achievement.
His Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy , in whose data-collection and computations fellow Royal Society members - including Wren and Halley - played a significant part, set science on its modern course although few contemporaries understood it.
Long-term, however, 17th-century advances in microscopy, medicine, chemistry and biology have probably been as important as Newton's laws of motion, and the development of precision instruments placed Britain in the forefront of specialist equipment-making a field in which Wren and Hooke were particularly active.
This kind of mass-produced new technology looked set to make the fortune of the inventor and patent-holder, and as a result, the smooth collaboration amongst members of the Royal Society and their cooperation with foreign members abroad was regularly marred by ugly priority and patent disputes. These indicate the growing tension between the 'group' model of science Bacon's dream of Solomon's house and the individual, 'virtuoso' model.
Britain's rapid industrialisation By there were scientific institutions across Britain, and a commitment to science as the firm basis for success in commerce and industry, and for national prosperity, was an established plank in the political agenda.
Britain's rapid industrialisation over the next century, and its domination of world trade, confirmed the importance of science in driving the economy. With the inevitable increasing professionalism of science, the success of the activities of the gentlemen amateurs who had founded the Royal Society, and who had always been regarded with some amusement by the public at large, looked increasingly irrelevant.
However, the patterns of group activity, documenting and corroborating experimental results, and public dissemination of outcomes including publication in science-dedicated journals , which the Society established, set lastingly important standards for scientific practice.
In the long run, these standard protocols and procedures may turn out to have left a more lasting legacy than 'discoveries' made by individual scientist-members. July She is currently working on a companion biography of Robert Hooke.
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