Fun Fact Friday! Fact 14
Posted by Daubin Barshtak on June 15, 2012.
Fun Fact Friday:
Tycho Brahe, a man famous for wearing a false nose made of silver and gold after losing his own in a duel, was a pioneering astronomer. His discovery of a supernova in the Milky Way in 1572, changed the way that astronomers observed and recorded the night sky. Part of this revolution was the need to record the time of all observations accurately. So Brahe sent a request to Swiss clockmaker Burgi to incorporate the minute hand on the clock face. Burgi improved on existing clocks with the invention of the remontoire, (from the French word remonter, meaning 'to wind') a small secondary source of power, a weight or spring, which runs the timekeeping mechanism and is itself periodically rewound by the timepiece's main power source, such as a mainspring. It improved the performance of his clocks by reducing the factor of the power fluctuations caused by the action of the mainspring.
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