Item 74 - Letter from Richard Sheepshanks

RS is too ill to be examiner at Cambridge. He is glad WW cannot stand for the Lucasian professorship: 'The Heads I dare say have made up their minds so that your chance would have been small...I should have felt sorry if you had tried and failed in obtaining anything else. Besides the ladies'. Edward Troughton 'has forgotten all he knew of clocks, springs etc and though he may talk about them will not of course think much now. I fear the springs but the experiment might be worth trying, only, don't expect any light from anybody as nobody knows anything about it except that it goes by a spring'. RS understands that the intended advantage of Hardy's work in the first scapement is to make the moving force constant. He got the following information from Molyneux concerning the pendulum: 'The compensation for heat and cold is contained of course in the pendulum for long and short arcs in the irregularity in the moving force in the spring at the top of the pendulum. Now the difficulties he apprehends are from the thickening of the oil upon the pallets. When the oil thickens from age the vibrations are of course smaller and then if the vibrations in long or short arise are not correct the clock may gain or lose according as the spring at the top is too tender (I fancy) or too stiff...The pendulum and its compensation are relied upon I believe to supply all occasional defects and Troughton swears that a perfect pendulum won't go well that he has made such but that the clocks went no better perhaps more with them'.