Jean+Foucault

Jean Foucault’s demonstration in 1851 of the diurnal motion of the Earth by the rotation of oscillation of a freely suspended, long and heavy Pendulum in the pantheon in Paris, caused a sensation in both the learned and popular worlds, for it was the first dynamical proof of the Earths rotation. In the following year he invented (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 researchers.

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