Wilkins'idea was to choose the length of a " seconds pendulum " ( a pendulum with a half-period of one second ) as the unit of length : such pendulums had recently been demonstrated by Christiaan Huygens, and their length is quite close to one modern metre ( as well as to some other length units which were then in use, such as the yard ).
42.
I don't know if having once tagged it I'm allowed to untag it, but I went into the article and, despite that it took some work, corrected some of the more glaring mistakes such as those regarding Mouton and the second pendulum using " Klein World of Measurement " and then added Klein as a reference . Rktect 18 : 48, August 28, 2005 ( UTC)
43.
*" The Jesuits were also a major contributor to pendulum clocks in the 17th and 18th centuries, [ 53 ] having had an " unusually keen appreciation of the importance of precision " . [ 54 ] In measuring an accurate one-second pendulum, for example, the Italian astronomer Father Giovanni Battista Riccioli persuaded nine fellow Jesuits " to count nearly 87, 000 oscillations in a single day . " "-What does " major contributor " mean?
