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The invention of the spinning machine has been variously attributed to Paul, Wyatt, Hargreaves, Higley, and Arkwright. The invention of the balance-spring was claimed by Huyghens, a Dutchman, Hautefeuille, a Frenchman, and Hooke, an Englishman. There is scarcely a point of detail in the locomotive but is the subject of dispute.
Galileo published his discovery of the isochronous property of the pendulum in 1639. Richard Harris of London took the hint, and connected the pendulum with clock-work movement in 1641. Huyghens subsequently improved the connection, and succeeded in constructing very trustworthy time-keepers, certainly before 1658.
Another example: the machine for measuring duration is at first a simple clepsydra; then there are added marks indicating the subdivisions of time, then a water gauge causes a hand to move around a dial, then two hands for the hours and minutes; then comes a great moment by the use of weights the clepsydra becomes a clock, at first massive and cumbersome, later lightened, becoming capable, with Tycho-Brahé, of marking seconds; and then another moment Huyghens invents the spiral spring to replace the weights, and the clock, simplified and lightened, becomes the watch.
In the intermingling of forces there is no deterioration; each produces its own specific effect. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, through the works of Borelli, Hooke, and Huyghens, it had become plain that circular motions could be accounted for by the laws of Galileo.
To the young he was ever ready to give encouragement and help; and struggling talent always found in him a kindly critic and a sympathising friend. He lived to see and to make the acquaintance of Brederôo, Vondel, Cats and Huyghens, the men whose names were to make the period of Frederick Henry the most illustrious in the annals of Dutch literature.
It has been seen that gunpowder was the explosive used to produce a vacuum in Huyghens' engine, and that it was abandoned in favor of gas by Buren in 1823. The reason of departure is very obvious: a gunpowder explosion and a gaseous explosion differ in very important practical points.
In the time of Huyghens and Euler a medium had been assumed for the transmission of the waves of light; but Newton raised the objection that, if light consisted of the waves of such a medium, shadows could not exist. The waves, he contended, would bend round opaque bodies and produce the motion of light behind them, as sound turns a corner, or as waves of water wash round a rock.
It remained for the mechanical ingenuity of Huyghens to construct a satisfactory pendulum clock. As a theoretical result of the studies of rolling and oscillating bodies, there was developed what is usually spoken of as the third law of motion namely, the law that a given force operates upon a moving body with an effect proportionate to its effect upon the same body when at rest.
The programme was put forth in the name of Amos Dettonville, the anagram of Pascal’s assumed name as the writer of the ‘Provincial Letters.’ Huyghens, Sluzsius, a canon of the Cathedral of Liège, and Wren, the architect of St Paul’s, sent in partial solutions of the problems—those of Wren especially attracting the interest of both Fermat and Roberval.
And besides the nobleness and pleasure of the studies, may we not be so bold as to say that they are no small help to the advancement of wisdom and morality? HUYGHENS, Conjectures concerning the Planetary Worlds.
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