> > This sounds somewhat similar to the now very old, and obsolete clocks used > in automobiles around sixty years ago. They worked like this. A spring > would drive the clock through an escapement. As the spring unwound, two > contacts would make, and a small electromagnet would wind the spring back > up very rapidly. This would happen roughly every five minutes or so. You > could hear it when it happened. Of course no solid state stuff back then, > just brute force mechanics. I took one apart once just to satisfy my > curiosity. Pretty ingenious for the day. Thanks for the fond memories. > Ira. >
Actually, they were even more clever than that. To reduce the manufacturing precision needed, the tension of the escapement spring (which in concert with the mass of the pendulum wheel determines the "tick" frequency) was adjustable. Furthermore, the adjustment would occur, by a small fixed amount, every time the clock was set. So, if the clock was running slowly, and you reset the time ahead, the spring would be set a little tighter too, so that the clock would then run slightly faster. After a few days of setting the time, it would be perfectly, so to speak, "dialed in". The ultimate accuracy, while never great, could definitely get to be around a minute per week or so. The only time this screwed up was for daylight savings time adjustments, and even this would correct itself within a day or two of resetting the clock. (I took one apart too, from the 1970 Cadillac I had in college. At first I didn't understand why some of the linkages seemed so sloppy, then I discovered that this was part of the auto-adjustment mechanism.) ~~ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/fd62f3f3-1af0-4d80-829d-7b963c2df30c%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
