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Updated: May 2, 2025
He also took up the controversy against Hooke as to the superiority of telescopic over plain sights to quadrants, Hooke contending in favor of the plain. In this controversy, the subject of which attracted wide attention, Huygens was completely victorious; and Hooke, being unable to refute Huygens's arguments, exhibited such irritability that he increased his already general unpopularity.
On seventeen nights of the same opposition, F. Kaiser of Leyden obtained drawings in which nearly all the markings noted in 1830 at Berlin reappeared, besides spots frequently seen respectively by Arago in 1813, by Herschel in 1783, and one sketched by Huygens in 1672 with a writing-pen in his diary.
His friend and pupil, Renieri, undertook in this emergency to arrange and complete his observations and calculations; but before he had made much progress in the arduous task, each of the four commissioners died in succession, and it was with great difficulty that Constantine Huygens succeeded in renewing the scheme.
England has the honour of making the first advances. It was an Englishman, Norwood, who made the first measurement of a degree between London and York, and fixed it at 122,399 English yards. The attention of the world thus once awakened, Huygens and Cassini applied themselves to ascertain the figure of the earth.
It was while he was a student in the university of his native city that his attention was arrested by the vibrations of a lamp suspended from the ceiling of the cathedral; and before he had quitted the church, while the choir was chanting mediaeval anthems, he had compared those vibrations with his own pulse, which after repeated experiments, ended in the construction of the first pendulum, applied not as it was by Huygens to the measurement of time, but to medical science, to enable physicians to ascertain the rate of the pulse.
Early in life young Huygens began his career in the legal profession, completing his education in the juridical school at Breda; but his taste for mathematics soon led him to neglect his legal studies, and his aptitude for scientific researches was so marked that Descartes predicted great things of him even while he was a mere tyro in the field of scientific investigation.
By observing at what point this exactly covered an object under examination, and knowing the focal length of the telescope and the width of the metal, he could then deduce the apparent angular breadth of the object. Huygens discovered also that an object placed in the common focus of the two lenses of a Kepler telescope appears distinct and clearly defined.
Huygens declared that, were it not for an unforeseen combination of circumstances, the invention of the telescope would require "a superhuman genius;" it is known that we owe it to children who were playing with pieces of glass in an optician's shop. Schönbein discovered ozone, thanks to the phosphorous odor of air traversed by electric sparks.
There were ancient striking clocks, such as the monks may have used to disturb them for early prayers, which, with a horrible rattle of wheels and clash of heavy weights, hammered the alarm. There were the tremendous watches of river captains who had aspired to go to sea, and old crutch escapement watches which Huygens himself had perhaps handled in Holland.
The advent of the pendulum, invented probably by Christian Huygens, a Dutch mathematician, opened up no end of complications for the early clockmakers. In the first place they could not decide where to put this new article. Some placed the pendulum at the front of their clock, letting it dangle down across the face; others tried to conceal it by hanging it outside the back.
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