Question

What motion inside the mechanical clock represents simple harmonic motion? Can you describe this in a little more detail?

Answer 1

Mechanical clocks are also called as grandfather clocks.

They work by having a weight connected to a string which is called as pendulum, which is wrapped around a shaft.

The pendulum of the grandfather clock is the oscillator.

The weights always try to pull down on the gear due to gravity. The pully swings and the weights lowers. From the conservation of energy the PE gets transerred to the KE of motion of the pendulum. This keeps going the pendulum until and unless some friction or other unbalanced force comes into the picture.

The length of pendulum is set accordingly to have a period of 1 s.