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
Foucault pendulum vector diagrams along with the rotation of the Earth and has an angular velocity equal to that of the Earth's angular velocity. Once the bob is displaced from the central axis of the pendulum and then released there no longer is a force acting on the bob that causes it to revolve about the central axis of the pendulum and rotate (turn) with the Earth. The point of significance is that the force imparting an angular velocity to the pre-released bob is no longer acting on the swinging bob. At the North Pole, this force takes one day for the direction of