Kater's pendulum minutes per day slower than at Paris, or equivalently the length of a pendulum with a swing of one second there was 1¼ Paris "lines", or 2.6 mm, shorter than at Paris. It was realized by the scientists of the day, and proven by Isaac Newton in 1687, that this was due to the fact that the Earth was not a perfect sphere but slightly oblate; it was thicker at the equator because of the Earth's rotation. Since the surface was farther from the Earth's center at Cayenne than at Paris, gravity was weaker there. Since that time pendulums began
Foucault pendulum vector diagrams time increases because the central axis of the pendulum is aligned with the axis of rotation of the Earth at the North Pole and then the angle of misalignment increases as the latitude decreases to the point of perpendicularity at the Equator. The angular velocity in relation to the rotation of the Earth's axis that is imparted to the pendulum bob decreases with the cosine of the degree of misalignment of the central axis of the pendulum in comparison to the axis of rotation of the Earth. There are zero degrees of misalignment at the North Pole and the cosine