The Wonder Book of Knowledge: The Marvels of Modern Industry and Invention, the Interesting Stories of Common Things, the Mysterious Processes of Nature Simply Explained
History
The Wonder Book of Knowledge: The Marvels of Modern Industry and Invention, the Interesting Stories of Common Things, the Mysterious Processes of Nature Simply Explained
Industrial arts -- History
In order to obtain exactly 18,000 vibrations of the balance in an hour,
it will be seen that the weight of the wheel and the strength of the
hair spring must be perfectly adapted each to the other. The shorter the
spring is made the more rigid it becomes, and so the regulator is made a
part of the watch, but its action must be very limited or its effect on
the spring will introduce other serious disturbances. The practical
method of securing the proper and ready adaptation of balances to
springs is to place in the rims of the balance a number of small screws
having relatively heavy heads. Suppose now that we have a balance fitted
with screws of the number and weight to exactly adapt it to a spring, so
that at a normal temperature of, say, 70 degrees, it would vibrate
exactly 18,000 times per hour. When we place the watch in an oven the
heat of which is 95 degrees, we might find that it had lost seven
seconds. That would show that the wheel was too large when at 95
degrees, although just right at 70 degrees. Really, that is a very
serious matter--it would lose at the rate of 2-4/5 minutes in a day. But
after all it need not be so very serious, because if we change the
location of one screw on each half of the balance so as to place it
nearer the free end of the rim when the heat curls the rim inward, it
will carry a larger proportion of the weight than if the screws had not
been moved. It may require repeated trials to determine the required
position of the rim screws, and both skill and good judgment are
essential. It will be readily understood that numerous manipulations of
this kind constitute no small items in the cost of producing high-grade
watches.
Large quantities of the cheaper class of watches are now made by
machinery in the United States, Switzerland, France, Germany and
England. They are generally produced on the interchangeable system, that
is, if any part of a watch has become unfit for service, it can be
cheaply replaced by an exact duplicate, the labor of the watch repairer
thus becoming easy and expeditious.
* * * * *
How does a Monorail Gyroscope Railway Operate?
The last decade has brought a railway with a single line of rails, on
which the car is kept erect by the steadying power of a pair of heavy
gyroscopes, or flywheels, rotating in opposite directions at very high
velocity. There are two recent inventions of this kind, an English and a
German, practically the same in character.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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