Appendix A1 - Discovery of synchronization by Christiaan Huygens

Summary

In this Appendix we present translations of the original texts of Christiaan Huygens where he describes the discovery of synchronization [Huygens 1967a,b].

A letter from Christiaan Huygens to his father, Constantyn Huygens

26 February 1665.

While I was forced to stay in bed for a few days and made observations on my two clocks of the new workshop, I noticed a wonderful effect that nobody could have thought of before. The two clocks, while hanging [on the wall] side by side with a distance of one or two feet between, kept in pace relative to each other with a precision so high that the two pendulums always swung together, and never varied. While I admired this for some time, I finally found that this happened due to a sort of sympathy: when I made the pendulums swing at differing paces, I found that half an hour later, they always returned to synchronism and kept it constantly afterwards, as long as I let them go. Then, I put them further away from one another, hanging one on one side of the room and the other one fifteen feet away. I saw that after one day, there was a difference of five seconds between them and, consequently, their earlier agreement was only due to some sympathy that, in my opinion, cannot be caused by anything other than the imperceptible stirring of the air due to the motion of the pendulums. Yet the clocks are inside closed boxes that weigh, including all the lead, a little less than a hundred pounds each.