Pendulum Motion

This entire article about the history of the pendulum was surprisingly very new too me in terms of what I learned. I had no idea that the invention of the pendulum itself offered so much to the scientific world from being able to provide a much more accurate and reliable time-keeping method to even leading astronomers to better map out our planet. The idea that the pendulum was developed as a standard that all scientists could reference as a period of time measurement was astonishing because I didn't think that keeping time before this development was all that difficult. Besides contributions by Galieo and his developments with pendulum laws I was really interested to see that before further developments with pendula, the problem of correctly mapping out longitude on a map was very prevalent. As Gemma Frisius, the Flemish astronomer discovered, measuring correct revolutions of the earth with the times of day required some sort of standard in time-keeping. So overall I was pretty astounded at the many uses of the pendulum itself and how important it was to world history.