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In the end it was to prove fortunate that my first attempt at a free pendulum ended in failure, for otherwise I would not have been spurred on to make W5. W4 was a compact wall clock, about the size of a Vienna regulator, but with two pendulums of different lengths swinging side by side. The shorter pendulum, a half-second slave, operated a pair of count wheels and took impulse every fifteen seconds. The longer one was the master, which swung freely for four minutes before receiving an impulse, during which time it had made 173 full vibrations. I took some pleasure in choosing that prime number, but almost any other number would have done equally well, for if there is no contact with the free pendulum between impulses, it can hardly matter how many swings it has made. Nothing in the mechanism depends on the particular number, though it must of course be an integer. The bob could be raised to give 174 vibrations in the four minutes and work equally well without any other adjustment. When details of W4 were prematurely published (Woodward 1974), an unwise step in any branch of research, the irrelevance of the master pendulum’s frequency did indeed puzzle some readers, though not for long.
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