Léon Foucault pendulum suspended from the roof of the Panthéon, Paris. The experiment caused a sensation in both the learned and popular worlds, and ""Foucault pendulums"" were suspended in major cities across Europe and America and attracted crowds. In the following year he used (and named) the gyroscope as a conceptually simpler experimental proof. In 1855, he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his 'very remarkable experimental researches'. Earlier in the same year he was made "physicien" (physicist) at the imperial observatory at Paris. In September 1855 he discovered that the force required for the rotation of a copper
Earth's rotation and clockwise, respectively). Hooke, following a suggestion from Newton in 1679, tried unsuccessfully to verify the predicted eastward deviation of a body dropped from a height of , but definitive results were obtained later, in the late 18th and early 19th century, by Giovanni Battista Guglielmini in Bologna, Johann Friedrich Benzenberg in Hamburg and Ferdinand Reich in Freiberg, using taller towers and carefully released weights. A ball dropped from a height of departed by from the vertical compared with a calculated value of . The most celebrated test of Earth's rotation is the Foucault pendulum first built by physicist Léon