Antique Clocks: Mercury Pendulums

Video Transcript

We need to talk about Mercury Pendulums because you'll find them in French Crystal Regulators, as you heard about before or in certain "true" regulators, large wall clocks that you might find out there. In this case, we're looking at a French Crystal Regulator Pendulum and the Mercury inside there, as in all these Mercury compensating pendulums, is designed to compensate for temperature changes. This is not to look pretty, this is, actually has a function. Because, we talked about Pendulum clocks, why they work, because the pendulum of a fixed length swings at a fixed rate. But with a temperature change, that's the Pendulum Rod can actually get longer if it gets hotter in the house, or shorter if it gets colder. If it gets longer, you have a longer pendulum, the clock slows down. So a way, one way to counteract that, is to actually have two tubes of Mercury inside and as the temperature heats up, our pendulum wants to grow longer and slow down. But the Mercury inside wants to expand upwards and if you have the right amount of Mercury in there, the amount that expands upwards compensates for the amount that the pendulum grows longer and you maintain accuracy. In large pendulum wall regulator clocks, you'll often see very large Mercury Pendulums can have ten, fifteen, sixty pounds of Mercury in there. So, obviously, you want to be careful with those, but often they're an important part of a large, collectible wall clock, if you retain the original Mercury Pendulum with its glass vials to let you see what's inside.

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