Quotes about pendulum (45 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Only few people, the leaders, have graduated from the school of religion. The others continue to swing back and forth like a pendulum. The lost sheep.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

School , Religion , People

“Everyone thinks and imagines that life is easier on the other side. Their minds swing like a pendulum.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Imagination , Thinking , Life

“The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to his own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 397

Life , History , Study , Teachers

“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

Sense

“It now remains that we find the amount of time of descent through the channel. This we shall obtain from the marvelous property of the pendulum, which is that it makes all its vibrations, large or small, in equal times. This requires, once and for all, that two or three or four patient and curious friends, having noted a fixed star that stands against some fixed marker, taking a pendulum of any length, shall go counting its vibrations during the whole time of return of the fixed star to its original point, and this will be the number of vibrations in 24 hours. From the number of these we can find the number of vibrations of any other pendulums, longer or shorter, at will, so that if for example those counted by us in 24 hours were 234,567, then taking another shorter pendulum with which one counts 800 vibrations while another counts 150 of the longer pendulum, we already have, by the golden rule, the number of vibrations for the whole time of 24 hours; and if we want to know the time of descent through the channel, we can easily find not only the minutes, seconds, and sixtieths of seconds, but beyond that as we please. It is true that we can pass a more exact measure by having observed the flow of water through a thin passage, for by collecting this and having weighed what passes in one minute, for example, then by weighing what passes in the time of descent through the channel we can find the most exact measure and quantity of this time, especially by making use of a balance so precise as to weigh one sixtieth of a grain.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

Letter to Giovanni Battista Baliani (1639)

Star , Water , Time

“When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Foreword to Ernest Gellner Words and Things (1959)
1950s

World , Boy , Time , Indifference

“Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Life , Pain

“All right, the pendulum isn’t working. Sometimes you need an accelerant to help it.” – Death
“Like gasoline?” – Nick
“Yes, Nick. We’re going to set the book and your pendulum on fire and then use them ’cause we’re just that intelligent.” – Death”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

Death , Books , Intelligence , Help

“The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Life

“The pendulum swings between Light and Darkness”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Light

“Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic.”

Ray Bradbury book The October Country

Source: The October Country

Life , Art

“So the pendulum swings, now violently, now slowly; and every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.”

William Ralph Inge (1860–1954) Dean of St Pauls

" Democracy and the Future http://books.google.com/books?id=KAhOjxIHy4QC&q="so+the+pendulum+swings+now+violently+now+slowly+and+every+institution+not+only+carries+within+it+the+seeds+of+its+own+dissolution+but+prepares+the+way+for+its+most+hated+rival"&pg=PA289#v=onepage" The Atlantic Monthly (March 1922)

Hate , Way

“Opinion is like a pendulum and obeys the same law. If it goes past the centre of gravity on one side, it must go a like distance on the other; and it is only after a certain time that it finds the true point at which it can remain at rest.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2 "Further Psychological Observations" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims

Law , Time , Past

“Most, if not all, of the great ideas of modern mathematics have had their origin in observation. Take, for instance, the arithmetical theory of forms, of which the foundation was laid in the diophantine theorems of Fermat, left without proof by their author, which resisted all efforts of the myriad-minded Euler to reduce to demonstration, and only yielded up their cause of being when turned over in the blow-pipe flame of Gauss’s transcendent genius; or the doctrine of double periodicity, which resulted from the observation of Jacobi of a purely analytical fact of transformation; or Legendre’s law of reciprocity; or Sturm’s theorem about the roots of equations, which, as he informed me with his own lips, stared him in the face in the midst of some mechanical investigations connected (if my memory serves me right) with the motion of compound pendulums; or Huyghen’s method of continued fractions, characterized by Lagrange as one of the principal discoveries of that great mathematician, and to which he appears to have been led by the construction of his Planetary Automaton; or the new algebra, speaking of which one of my predecessors (Mr. Spottiswoode) has said, not without just reason and authority, from this chair, “that it reaches out and indissolubly connects itself each year with fresh branches of mathematics, that the theory of equations has become almost new through it, algebraic 31 geometry transfigured in its light, that the calculus of variations, molecular physics, and mechanics” (he might, if speaking at the present moment, go on to add the theory of elasticity and the development of the integral calculus) “have all felt its influence.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

James Joseph Sylvester. "A Plea for the Mathematician, Nature," Vol. 1, p. 238; Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 655, 656.

Law , Mathematics , Idea , Effort

“To some extent my generation was reared on the Three Cheers view of history. This patriotic view of our past had a long run. It saw Australian history as largely a success. While the convict era was a source of shame or unease, nearly everything that came after was believed to be pretty good. There is a rival view, which I call the Black Armband view of history. In recent years it has assailed the optimistic view of history. The black armbands were quietly worn in official circles in 1988. The multicultural folk busily preached their message that until they arrived much of Australian history was a disgrace. The past treatment of Aborigines, of Chinese, of Kanakas, of non-British migrants, of women, the very old, the very young, and the poor was singled out, sometimes legitimately, sometimes not. … The Black Armband view of history might well represent the swing of the pendulum from a position that had been too favourable, too self congratulatory, to an opposite extreme that is even more unreal and decidedly jaundiced.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

"Balance Sheet On Our History," Quadrant (July 1993)

Women , History , Success , Past

“Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth. Divine Providence has a mission for her children to fulfill; though a mission unrecognized by political economists. There is ever a moral balance preserved in the universe, like the vibrations of the pendulum. The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and skepticism.”

Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/57/12260.html, vol. 1, letter 33

Children , Age , Universe , Heart

“Until recently, the question was 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' It should have been changed to 'Why can't both sexes be more like the best parts of each other?' Instead, the pendulum swung to the 1960s feminist lapel button Adam Was a First Draft. True enough. So are we all.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 310.

Sex , Question , Change , Parting

“Beautiful Delilah, dressed in the latest style
Swingin' like a pendulum, walkin' down the aisle
Deep romantic eyes, speak so low in miles
Maybe she will settle down and marry after a while”

Chuck Berry (1926–2017) American rock-and-roll musician

"Beautiful Delilah" (1958)
Song lyrics

Beauty

“The Democratic and Republican parties each operates as a necessary counterweight in a partnership designed to keep the pendulum of power swinging in perpetuity from the one set of colluding quislings to the other, and back.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

“A Palin Third-Party?” http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=530 WorldNetDaily.com, January 15, 2010.
2010s, 2010

Partnership

“The combination of the Liberal and Labour Parties is much stronger than the Liberal Party would be if there were no third Party in existence. Many men who would in that case have voted for us voted on this occasion as the Labour Party told them i. e. for the Liberals. The Labour Party has "come to stay"…the existence of the third Party deprives us of the full benefits of the 'swing of the pendulum', introduces a new element into politics and confronts us with a new difficulty.”

Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) British politician

Late 1910s, quoted in E. H. H. Green, The Crisis of Conservatism (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 141.
1910s

Men

“So what’s happened since ’92, it’s where the administrations that changed quite dramatically, the foreign policy, and it was working more like pendulum, swinging from one side to the other. Clinton did very little, W did too much, Obama has been doing nothing. It sent a message – sent numerous messages across the world. While people knew in the 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s that America was there, America was consistent. Even if you have a change in the Oval Office, one party replaces another, you could rely on the United States. America was behind American allies. Today? It’s probably, it’s a springtime to be an American enemy because this administration gives up everything to the enemies and betrays allies. And going back to George W. administration, it’s very popular to criticize Bush today, Bush 43. Especially for the Iraq invasion, and I’ve heard many voices, even within the Republican Party, it’s just floating with the popular trend. First of all, I have to say as somebody who was born and raised in a Communist country, I cannot criticize any action that led to the destruction of dictatorship. I think his people had wrong expectations. When they saw the collapse of Saddam’s dictatorship after American invasion of Iraq and then the collapse of a few other dictatorships during the Arab Spring, they had expectations that next day, it would be a democracy. It’s wrong. It was very naive because dictators succeeds the staying in power for so many years, not because he’s a nice guy, just helps his people to get out of poverty, but because he’s brutal, he’s cruel. He succeeds in destroying opposition, first political opposition and then freedom of press and remaining horizontal ties in the society. All the NGOs, anything that could represent not just a threat to him, but it’s any sort of the slightest dissent. It’s kind of a political desert. What do you expect in a desert after 10, 20, 30 – in the case of Gaddafi, 42 years of dictatorship?”

Garry Kasparov (1963) former chess world champion

2010s, Interview with Bill Kristol (2016)

People , World , Guy , Democracy

“These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in the other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, the other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another.”

Thomas Kuhn book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Source: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), XII. The Resolution of Revolutions, p. 149

World , Law , Sense , Change

“Financial markets are supposed to swing like a pendulum: They may fluctuate wildly in response to exogenous shocks, but eventually they are supposed to come to rest at an equilibrium point and that point is supposed to be the same irrespective of the interim fluctuations. Instead, as I told Congress, financial markets behaved more like a wrecking ball, swinging from country to country and knocking over the weaker ones.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the international financial system itself constituted the main ingredient in the meltdown process.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

On the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis
The Crisis of Global Capitalism (1998)

Country

“All my work keeps going like a pendulum; it seems to swing back to something I was involved with earlier, or it moves between horizontality and verticality, circularity, or a composite of them. For me, I suppose that change is the only constant.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Lee Krasner, ‎Marcia Tucker, ‎Whitney Museum of American Art (1973) Lee Krasner: large paintings. Nr. 33. p. 8.

Change

“The pendulum started swinging towards the true spirit of Islam at the very start of Shah Jahan’s reign in 1628 AD. Its outer symbol was the reappearance of the beard on the face of the emperor. …. In 1635 AD, Shah Jahan’s soldiers captured some ladies of the royal Bundela family after Jujhar Singh and his sons failed to kill them in the time-honoured Rajput tradition. In the words of Jadunath Sarkar, “Mothers and daughters of kings, they were robbed of their religion and forced to lead the infamous life of the Mughal harem.” Shah Jahan himself made a triumphal entry into Orchha, the capital of the Bundelas, demolished the lofty and massive temple of Bir Singh Dev, and raised a mosque in its place. Two sons and one grandson of Jujhar Singh who were of tender age, were made Musalmans. Another son of Jujhar Singh, Udaybhan, and a minister, Shyam Dawa, had fled to Golconda where they were captured by Qutbul-Mulk and sent to Shah Jahan. According to Badshahnama again, “Udaybhan and Shyam Dawa, who were of full age, were offered the alternative of Islam or death. They chose the latter and were sent to hell.””

Shah Jahan (1592–1666) 5th Mughal Emperor

Jadunath Sarkar; Badshahnama https://archive.org/stream/cu31924073036778#page/n63/mode/2up, quoted in Goel, Sita Ram (2001). The story of Islamic imperialism in India. Chapter 7 ISBN 9788185990231

Life , Death , Age , Family

“For liberals, the observation that 'the peasants are revolting' is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

2010s, 2010, The great peasant revolt of 2010 (2010)

People , Optimism , Sense

“Gravitation is not only similar to inertia in its generality, it is also measured by the same number… the mass. The inertial mass is what Newton calls the "quantity of matter": it is a measure for the resistance offered by a body to a force trying to alter its state of motion. It might be called the "passive mass." The gravitational mass, on the other hand, is a measure of the force exerted by the body in attracting other bodies. We might call it the "active" mass. The equality of active and passive, or gravitational and inertial, mass was in Newton's system a most remarkable accidental co-incidence, something like a miracle. Newton himself decidedly felt it as such, and made experiments to verify it, by swinging a pendulum with a hollow bob which could be filled with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its gravitational mass, the inertia to its inertial mass: the period of its swing thus depends on the ratio between these two masses. The fact that the period is always the same therefore proves that the gravitational and inertial masses are equal.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

Kosmos (1932), Above is Beginning Quote of the Last Chapter: Relativity and Modern Theories of the Universe -->

Dependency

“In developing his theory of gravitation, Newton assigned to every material body another property which is called its gravitational mass. Gravitational mass determines the force exerted by the body on other bodies, and so its function appears to be quite distinct from that of inertial mass. Nevertheless, the two are found to be identical in magnitude. Newton made experiments to verify this remarkable equality by swinging a pendulum with a bob which could be made with different materials. The period of the swing depended on the ratio of the inertial and gravitational masses of the pendulum, but in all cases it was found to be the same… In 1890 Eötvös made a much more refined test with the aid of a… torsion balance. Repeated experiments showed that inertial mass and gravitational mass were equal to within one part in 100 million. Einstein suggested that this was because inertia and gravitation are identical.”

Gerald James Whitrow (1912–2000) British mathematician

p, 125
The Structure of the Universe: An Introduction to Cosmology (1949)

Appearance , Parting , Dependency

“Only in a small sailboat at sea are we reminded of our natural place in the universe. The sea forces upon us a natural scale. The sea limits one day’s passage to a hundred miles, not too different from the scale used by the ancient Hebrews to measure the throne of God. Small boat sailors parse the structures of the sea in days and weeks and months, not flashing minutes as the land bound do. They have recaptured nature’s pendulum.”

Reese Palley (1922–2015)

“Unlikely Passages” 1984

God , Nature , Universe , Sea

“Both the law of inertia and the law of gravitation contain a numerical factor or a constant belonging to matter, which is called mass. We have thus two definitions of mass; one by the law of inertia: mass is the ratio between force and acceleration. We may call the mass thus defined the inertial or passive mass, as it is a measure of the resistance offered by matter to a force acting on it. The second is defined by the law of gravitation, and might be called the gravitational or active mass, being a measure of the force exerted by one material body on another. The fact that these two constants or coefficients are the same is, in Newton's system, to be considered as a most remarkable accidental coincidence and was decidedly felt as such by Newton himself. He made experiments to determine the equality of the two masses by swinging a pendulum, of which the bob was hollow and could be filled up with different materials. The force acting on the pendulum is proportional to its active mass, its inertia is proportional to its passive mass, so that the period will depend on the ratio of the passive and the active mass. Consequently the fact that the period of all these different pendulums was the same, proves that this ratio is a constant, and can be made equal to unity by a suitable choice of units, i. e., the inertial and the gravitational mass are the same. These experiments have been repeated in the nineteenth century by Bessel, and in our own times by Eötvös and Zeeman, and the identity of the inertial and the gravitational mass is one of the best ascertained empirical facts in physics-perhaps the best. It follows that the so-called fictitious forces introduced by a motion of the body of reference, such as a rotation, are indistinguishable from real forces…. In Einstein's general theory of relativity there is also no formal theoretical difference, as there was in Newton's system…. the equality of inertial and gravitational mass is no longer an accidental coincidence, but a necessity.”

Willem de Sitter (1872–1934) Dutch cosmologist

p, 125
"The Astronomical Aspect of the Theory of Relativity" (1933)

Law , Time , Dependency

“As long as we try to project from the relative and conditioned to the absolute and unconditioned, we shall keep the pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism. The only way to stop this increasingly tiresome pendulum swing is to change our conception of what philosophy is good for. But that is not something which will be accomplished by a few neat arguments. It will be accomplished, if it ever is, by a long, slow process of cultural change – that is to say, of change in common sense, changes in the intuitions available for being pumped up by philosophical arguments.”

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) American philosopher

Introduction to Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Volume 3 (1998).

Way , Sense , Change

“As a public teacher of mere striplings, I am often amazed by the facility and absence of resistance with which the principles of the infinitesimal calculus are accepted and assimilated by the present race of learners. When I was young, a boy of sixteen or seventeen who knew his infinitesimal calculus would have been almost pointed at in the streets as a prodigy, like Dante, as a man who had seen hell. Now-a-days, our Woolwich cadets at the same age, talk with glee of tangents and asymptotes and points of contrary flexure and discuss questions of double maxima and minima, or ballistic pendulums, or motion in a resisting medium, under the familiar and ignoble name of sums.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

J. J. Sylvester. "Additional Notes to Prof. Sylvester's Exeter British Association Address", Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), pp. 717–718 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aas8085.0002.001;view=1up;seq=732

Age , Boy , Hell , Question

“What we see in both software development and military operations is a tendency for the pendulum to swing back and forth between extremes. Yet in most cases, we need a balance between armor and discipline and between mobility and agility. Actually, though, I would say that the leaders in both the agile and plan-driven camps occupy various places in the responsible middle. It’s only the over-enthusiastic followers who overinterpret “discipline” and “agility” to unhealthy degrees.”

Barry Boehm (1935) American software engineer

Tom DeMarco and Barry Boehm. " The agile methods fray http://cf.agilealliance.org/articles/system/article/file/872/file.pdf." Computer 35.6 (2002): 90-92.

“To every trend there is a counter-trend. There are a number of pendulums operating and each creates new business opportunities.”

Patrick Dixon book Futurewise

Futurewise (1998)

Business

“There's a sense that the drug war has proven its failure. Five or six years ago, people would say, "Well, we haven't really tried it." It's hard to say that with credibility any more. People tend to get bored with old ideas. and the war on drugs is becoming an old idea. There's a kind of natural pendulum or circularity, where people begin to think that change is inevitable. And that's going to happen in the drug area.”

Ethan Nadelmann (1957) American writer; campaigner for the legalization of marijuana

Mind Alteration, http://www.reason.com/news/show/32215.html an article published in Reason Magazine in July 1994.
The War on Drugs

War , People , Idea , Failure

“The new American finds his challenge and his love in the traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. This is not offered in criticism but only as observation. And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.”

John Steinbeck (1902–1968) American writer

Pt. 2
Travels With Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Love , Children , Time , Housing

“The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening.”

Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) Russian zoologist, evolutionary theorist, philosopher, scientist, revolutionary, economist, activist, geogr…

Anarchist Morality http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/AM/anarchist_moralitytc.html (1890)
Context: The history of human thought recalls the swinging of a pendulum which takes centuries to swing. After a long period of slumber comes a moment of awakening. Then thought frees herself from the chains with which those interested — rulers, lawyers, clerics — have carefully enwound her.
She shatters the chains. She subjects to severe criticism all that has been taught her, and lays bare the emptiness of the religious political, legal, and social prejudices amid which she has vegetated. She starts research in new paths, enriches our knowledge with new discoveries, creates new sciences.
But the inveterate enemies of thought — the government, the lawgiver, and the priest — soon recover from their defeat. By degrees they gather together their scattered forces, and remodel their faith and their code of laws to adapt them to the new needs.

History

“All the colours look brighter now.
Everything they say seems to sound new.
Slipping into tomorrow too quick,
Yesterday always too good to forget.
Stop the swing of the pendulum! Let us through!”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

“Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other.”

Eugene Field (1850–1895) American writer

The Writings in Prose and Verse of Eugene Field: The love affairs of a Bibliomaniac (1896), Ch. IV : The Mania of Collecting Seizes Me, p. 44
Context: Human thought is like a monstrous pendulum: it keeps swinging from one extreme to the other. Within the compass of five generations we find the Puritan first an uncompromising believer in demonology and magic, and then a scoffer at everything involving the play of fancy.

“I apply'd myself to the improving of the pendulum for such observations”

Robert Hooke (1635–1703) English natural philosopher, architect and polymath

As quoted by John Ward, The lives of the professors of Gresham college (1740) p. 171. https://books.google.com/books?id=jp5bAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA171
Context: About this time, 1655, having an opportunity of acquainting myself with astronomy by the kindness of Dr. Ward, I apply'd myself to the improving of the pendulum for such observations, and in the year 1656, or 1657, I contriv'd a way to continue the motion of the pendulum, so much commended by Ricciolus in his Almagestum which Dr. Ward had recommended to me to peruse. I made some trials to this end, which I found to succeed to my wish. The success of these made me further think of improving it for finding the longitude; and the method I had made for myself for mechanick inventions, quickly led me to the use of springs, instead of gravity, for the making a body vibrate in any posture. Whereupon I did first in great, and afterwards in smaller modules, satisfy myself of the practicableness of such an invention; and hoping to have made great advantage thereby, I acquainted divers of my freinds, and particularly Mr. Boyle, that I was possessed of such an invention, and crav'd their assistance for improving the use of it to my advantage. Immediately after his majesty's restoration Mr. Boyle was pleased to acquaint the lord Brouncher and Sir with it, who advis'd me to get a patent for the invention, and propounded very probable ways of making considerable advantage by it. To induce them to a belief of my performance, I shewed a pocket watch, accommodated with a spring, apply'd to the arbor of the ballance, to regulate the motion thereof, concealing the way I had for finding the longitude. This was so well approv'd of, that Sir Robert Moray drew me up the form of a patent, the principal part whereof, viz. the description of the watch so regulated, is his own hand writing, which I have yet by me. The discouragement I met with in the management of this affair, made me desist for that time.

“A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

A History of the United States of America During the First Administration of James Madison (1890), Vol. II, Ch. VI: Meeting of the Twelfth Congress; 1921 edition, p. 123
Context: A period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns.