Examples
The most common examples are mechanical clocks and watches. Others include:
- Wind-up toys - often as a simple mechanical motor, or to create automata. These may be either key-wound, or a simpler pullback motor.
- Most leaf shutters use a clockwork mechanism not unlike that of wristwatches to time the opening and closing of the shutter blades.
- Mechanisms to turn the lens of lighthouses before electric motors.
- Mechanical calculators, used before electronic computers were developed around World War 2. Among the most complex were Babbage's difference and analytical engines, which were mechanical versions of computers.
- Astronomical models, such as orreries whose history spans hundreds of years.
- Music boxes, which were very popular during the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th.
- Almost all phonographs built before the 1930s.
- Hand-powered electrical equipment, such as a clockwork radio, where an energy-storing spring accounting for much of the size and weight of the device spins a much smaller electric generator; such equipment is very popular where batteries and mains power (house current) are scarce.
Read more about this topic: Clockwork
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“No rules exist, and examples are simply life-savers answering the appeals of rules making vain attempts to exist.”
—André Breton (1896–1966)
“It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people’s attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)