Pendulum the pendulum could be used to measure the force of gravity. During his expedition to Cayenne, French Guiana in 1671, Jean Richer found that a pendulum clock was minutes per day slower at Cayenne than at Paris. From this he deduced that the force of gravity was lower at Cayenne. In 1687, Isaac Newton in "Principia Mathematica" showed that this was because the Earth was not a true sphere but slightly oblate (flattened at the poles) from the effect of centrifugal force due to its rotation, causing gravity to increase with latitude. Portable pendulums began to be taken on voyages
Pendulum the location of their center of oscillation. Huygens had discovered in 1673 that a pendulum has the same period when hung from its center of oscillation as when hung from its pivot, and the distance between the two points was equal to the length of a simple gravity pendulum of the same period. In 1818 British Captain Henry Kater invented the reversible Kater's pendulum which used this principle, making possible very accurate measurements of gravity. For the next century the reversible pendulum was the standard method of measuring absolute gravitational acceleration. In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault showed that the