Word: pendulum
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...intricate mechanical adjustments but a mere pocketful of small change maintains the accuracy of Big Ben.* "Whenever the clock is losing slightly," explained Astronomer Royal Dyson, "we just drop a ha'penny or a penny on a tray fixed about half way down the pendulum. If the clock is gaining, we take the penny out. As it takes a fifth of a second for the booming of Big Ben to reach the street, and two seconds to reach Trafalgar Square, we may consider that the limits of reasonable accuracy have been reached...
During the past year at the Cruft Laboratory Professor G. W. Pierce has been engaged in making some precision clocks for laboratory and observatory use. One of the clocks employs a pendulum enclosed in a vacuum chamber and kept at constant temperature. The pendulum has no escapement, driving spring or other mechanical attachment. Instead it is provided with a small slit through which a beam of light passes at each swing of the pendulum. The beam of light falls on a photoelectric cell and produces an electric current of short duration each second. These current pulses drive an auxiliary second...
...falling leaf." Above Anacostia, naval air station, Lieut. Williams rolled a Curtiss Hawk biplane onto its back, throttled the motor, let one wing dip. Wheels to the sky, pilot's head to the ground, the little ship began swinging back and forth, dropping rapidly like an ever-lengthening pendulum. Ingeniously averting the dread "inverted spin" Williams landed, gave to the Navy his valuable findings on the mastery of inverted flight to promote safety...
...instill in the mind of the student the importance of the part that his four years in college plays in acquiring the proper perspective toward his work in after-life. While a strict commercial training is as little to be desired as the exclusive program of "making contracts," the pendulum should swing more to a middle ground...
...parents were for the large institutions because it was thought that the greater educational opportunities lay with the greater facilities of library and laboratory, under more highly paid and, it was assumed, better teachers, and in the midst of a larger and more stimulating student body. But "the pendulum is swinging heavily the other way." That each of these great universities is beginning to make many colleges of its one large college is the highest testimony to the value of the old American type...