Image: Using Kater pendulum in India

Description: Drawing of the measurement of the acceleration of gravity with an invariable pendulum at Madras, India by British astronomer John Goldingham in 1821. From his 1822 paper to the Royal Society. The pendulum swings on two knife edge pivots suspended from a bracket on the wall, in front of a precision pendulum clock set to correct time by the stars. The periods of the two pendulums are compared, using a sight to eliminate parallax error. The strength of gravity is calculated from the period of the pendulum. Alterations to image: Removed caption and frame. Image contains aliasing artifacts from scanning of original halftone image, partially removed with Gimp Fourier transform tool. Converted to 64 greyscale PNG.
Title: Using Kater pendulum in India
Credit: Downloaded 2009-01-20 from Victor F. Lenzen, Robert P. Multauf (1964) 'Paper 44: Development of gravity pendulums in the 19th century' in United States National Museum Bulletin 240: Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology, reprinted in Bulletin of the Smithsonian Institution, 1964, Smithsonian Institution Press, USA, p.317, fig.13 on Google Books. Text credited drawing to John Goldingham (1822) 'Observations for Ascertaining the Length of the Pendulum at Madras in the East Indies', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 112, p.127
Author: John Goldingham
Permission: Public domain - Goldingham died in 1849
Usage Terms: Public domain
License: Public domain
Attribution Required?: No