Tautochrone Curve - The Tautochrone Problem

The Tautochrone Problem

It was in the left hand try-pot of the Pequod, with the soapstone diligently circling round me, that I was first indirectly struck by the remarkable fact, that in geometry all bodies gliding along the cycloid, my soapstone for example, will descend from any point in precisely the same time.

The tautochrone problem, the attempt to identify this curve, was solved by Christiaan Huygens in 1659. He proved geometrically in his Horologium oscillatorium, originally published in 1673, that the curve was a cycloid.

On a cycloid whose axis is erected on the perpendicular and whose vertex is located at the bottom, the times of descent, in which a body arrives at the lowest point at the vertex after having departed from any point on the cycloid, are equal to each other...

Huygens also proved that the time of descent is equal to the time a body takes to fall vertically the same distance as the diameter of the circle which generates the cycloid, multiplied by π⁄₂. In modern terms, this means that the time of descent is, where r is the radius of the circle which generates the cycloid and g is the gravity of Earth.

This solution was later used to attack the problem of the brachistochrone curve. Jakob Bernoulli solved the problem using calculus in a paper (Acta Eruditorum, 1690) that saw the first published use of the term integral.

The tautochrone problem was studied more closely when it was realized that a pendulum, which follows a circular path, was not isochronous and thus his pendulum clock would keep different time depending on how far the pendulum swung. After determining the correct path, Christiaan Huygens attempted to create pendulum clocks that used a string to suspend the bob and curb cheeks near the top of the string to change the path to the tautochrone curve. These attempts proved to not be useful for a number of reasons. First, the bending of the string causes friction, changing the timing. Second, there were much more significant sources of timing errors that overwhelmed any theoretical improvements that traveling on the tautochrone curve helps. Finally, the "circular error" of a pendulum decreases as length of the swing decreases, so better clock escapements could greatly reduce this source of inaccuracy.

Later, the mathematicians Joseph Louis Lagrange and Leonhard Euler provided an analytical solution to the problem.