Trinity College Clock is a historic

pendulum clock A pendulum clock is a clock that uses a pendulum, a swinging weight, as its timekeeping element. The advantage of a pendulum for timekeeping is that it is an approximate harmonic oscillator: It swings back and forth in a precise time interval dep ...

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any ...

. It is housed in one of the oldest buildings in the college, King Edward's Gate, also known as the

clock tower Clock towers are a specific type of structure that house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another building ...

. The building was formerly the entrance to King's Hall, a college which merged with

Michaelhouse Michaelhouse is a full boarding senior school for boys founded in 1896. It is located in the Balgowan, KwaZulu-Natal, Balgowan valley in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, Midlands of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The Spear’s Schools Index 2025 reco ...

to form Trinity College. The clock is noted for striking the hour twice, first on a low note (the "Trinity" chime) and then a higher one (the "St John's" chime). This peculiarity was noted by

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poetry, Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romanticism, Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Balla ...

in his

autobiographical An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life, providing a personal narrative that reflects on the author's experiences, memories, and insights. This genre allows individuals to share thei ...

poem: A common myth claims that the clock strikes the hour twice, because the fellows of St John's College once complained about its noise.

History

King Edward's Gate, in

Trinity Great Court Great Court is the main Courtyard, court of Trinity College, Cambridge, and reputed to be the largest enclosed courtyard in Europe. The court was completed by Thomas Nevile, master of the college, in the early years of the 17th century, when he ...

, otherwise known simply as the clock-tower, is one of the oldest buildings in the college. The first clock appears to have been installed in 1610 by Thomas Tennant, of London. The bell has survived to this day and bears the inscription: ("Trinity resounds in unity, 1610. Richard Holdfield made me.") Between 1726 and 1727, the clock mechanism was given to the village of Orwell, Cambridgeshire when the master,

Richard Bentley Richard Bentley FRS (; 27 January 1662 – 14 July 1742) was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. Considered the "founder of historical philology", Bentley is widely credited with establishing the English school of Hellenis ...

, provided a new clock and dial plate and three bells. In 1910, this eighteenth-century clock was replaced with a mechanism by Smith of Derby to a design by Lord Grimthorpe.

Monitoring project

300px, The Trinity College Clock mechanism and the Keeper of the Clock, Dr Hugh Hunt in February 2019 The clock is the subject of a current project coordinated by Dr Hugh Hunt, Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, calibrating it against the National Physical Laboratory time signal and other variables, including the amplitude of the pendulum, humidity, air temperature, air pressure, and air density. The clock is governed by a temperature-compensated pendulum, 2 metres in length, driven by a three-legged gravity escapement. It is capable of keeping time to better than one second in a month without any intervention, except for winding up its weights at least once a week.

References

External links

The Trinity Clock website
{{Trinity College, Cambridge Tourist attractions in Cambridge Individual clocks in England

Clock A clock or chronometer is a device that measures and displays time. The clock is one of the oldest Invention, human inventions, meeting the need to measure intervals of time shorter than the natural units such as the day, the lunar month, a ...