Olivia Kaminski and Nicole Twichell

Mrs. Profeta
Pendulum Report
4/19/16
This report will be about the pendulum wave apparatus as well as the early history, who
discovered the pendulum, and how we use them today. A pendulum is defined as an object that
has a small mass, it can also be known as a pendulum bob, and this is suspended from a wire or
string that has some sort of mass at the bottom of the string or wire. When displaced, a pendulum
will oscillate around its equilibrium point due to momentum in balance with the restoring force
of gravity.
The pendulum was created in 1656. Christiaan Huygens made the first pendulum clock.
The genius who is credited for discovering the pendulum was an Italian scientist who was
Galileo Galilei. He stated thousands of years ago how the pendulum worked, and pointed out the
constancy of a pendulum's period by comparing the movement of a swinging lamp in a cathedral
with his pulse rate.
The use of a pendulum was for timekeeping, and the pendulum was the world's most
accurate timekeeping system until the year of 1930. Pendulums are used to regulate pendulum
clocks, and are used in scientific instruments such as accelerometers and seismometers.
This paragraph will be talking about the calculations we did for our pendulum. For this
project we have to find the cycle time to find the lengths of each of the nine strings. We chose a
cycle time of 30 seconds. To calculate the time, divide the cycle time over the times the bobs

swung increasing one time every pendulum. After doing this for all nine trials we found the
length of each string. To find the length by multiplying gravity by the time over two times pie
squared. This answer is measured in meters so you must convert it to centimeters by multiplying
by one hundred. Do this also for all nine trials.
L=g(T/2 pi)2

Pendul
um

# of
Swin
gs

Time
(sec)

Leng
th
(cm)

(Trials)

25

1.2 sec

26

1.15sec

27

28

29
30
31
32
33

6
7
8
9

1.11
sec
1.07
sec
1.03
sec
1 sec
0.97
sec
0.94
sec
0.91
sec

36
cm
33
cm
31
cm
28
cm
26
cm
25
cm
23
cm
22
cm
21
cm

The pendulum we designed has golf balls painted ad volleyballs at the end of the strings.
Real volleyballs would be too big for this project so we used golf balls. This project design
which are the volleyballs, this is significant to us because both of us play volleyball for the
school, and also a club team. We both really enjoy playing the sport and thought it would be a
good idea if we put it in our project.
As conclusion, this project was very interesting because it provided us not only the skills
to build such an apparatus, but it also showed that our calculations resulted in the expected
movement of the pendulum.

References:
"pendulum." The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th 2016, "pendulum."
"Pendulum." Have Fun with Science. Web. 16 Apr. 2016.
The Editors of Encyclopdia Britannica. "Pendulum." Encyclopedia Britannica
Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, Web. 16 Apr. 2016.
London, John. "Facts About Pendulums." EHow. Demand Media, Web. 16 Apr. 2016.
"The Simple Pendulum." The Simple Pendulum. Web. 16 Apr. 2016.