The verge (or crown wheel) escapement is the earliest known type of mechanical escapement, the mechanism in a mechanical clock that controls its rate by allowing the gear train to advance at regular intervals or 'ticks'.he verge (or crown wheel) escapement is the earliest known type of mechanical escapement, the mechanism in a mechanical clock that controls its rate by allowing the gear train to advance at regular intervals or 'ticks'.
You need the foci for some construction methods. Just draw radii of length a from the ends of the minor axis. Given the foci, however, you can't uniquely determine the axes. You need additional information such as the length of one axis.
A line segment can be viewed as a degenerate case of an ellipse in which the semiminor axis goes to zero, the foci go to the endpoints, and the eccentricity goes to one. A standard definition of an ellipse is the set of points for which the sum of a point's distances to two foci is a constant; if this constant equals the distance between the foci, the line segment is the result.