Anchor escapement made today use it. Tower clocks are one of the few types of pendulum clock which the anchor escapement did not dominate. The varying force applied to the wheel train by the large exterior hands, exposed to wind, snow, and ice loads, was better handled by gravity escapements. The deadbeat escapement has two faces to the pallets, a 'locking' or 'dead' face, with a curved surface concentric with the axis on which the anchor rotates, and a sloping 'impulse' face. When an escape wheel tooth is resting against one of the dead faces, its force is directed through the anchor's
Anchor escapement it unwinds. An escapement in which changes in drive force do not affect the rate is called isochronous. The superior performance of the deadbeat over the recoil is due to improved isochronism. This is due to the different ways changes in drive force affect the swing of the pendulum in the two escapements: When the deadbeat was invented, clockmakers initially believed it had inferior isochronism to the anchor, because of the greater effect of changes in force on the pendulum's amplitude. Recent analyses point out that the nonisochronism of the anchor can cancel the circular error of the pendulum. That