Anchor escapement teeth, which made the escape wheel rotate once per minute so the second hand could be attached to its shaft. In a 30 tooth escape wheel the pallets span about 7½ teeth. The impulse angle of the pallets, which determined the swing of the pendulum, was 3°-4°. The anchor was the second widely used escapement in Europe, replacing the 400-year-old verge escapement in pendulum clocks. The pendulums in verge escapement clocks had very wide swings of 80° to 100°. In 1673, seventeen years after he invented the pendulum clock, Christiaan Huygens published his mathematical analysis of pendulums, "Horologium Oscillatorium". In
Escapement is made from a special steel alloy with 36% nickel called Invar whose length changes very little with temperature, swings as free of external influence as possible sealed in a vacuum chamber and does no work. It is in mechanical contact with its escapement for only a fraction of a second every 30 seconds. A secondary "slave" pendulum turns a ratchet, which triggers an electromagnet slightly less than every thirty seconds. This electromagnet releases a gravity lever onto the escapement above the master pendulum. A fraction of a second later (but exactly every 30 seconds), the motion of the master