metronome (thing)

Metronomes are universally used nowadays. At some point, almost every musician has tried to stick to the strict tempo dictated by its insistent ticks.

The History of the Metronome

The basis for creating accurate time-keepers was discovered in the late 16th century by Galileo Galilei. He was in church one day, and noticed that the incense burners used in the service swung backwards and forwards at the same rate, no matter how vigorous their movement was. He went on to conduct a number of experiments and concluded that pendulums are isochronous, i.e., a pendulum oscillates at the same frequency no matter what its amplitude is.

Originally, this idea was used to create various clock designs, but in 1696, Etieune Loulie modified these rudimentary designs to create a pendulum-based metronome. It was far from ideal, as it had no escapement mechanism, which meant its oscillations quickly died, and the pendulum would have to be restarted. Also, to get the low tempos required, the pendulum was prohibitively large, and changing tempos meant putting more or less weight on the end of the shaft, which was very inconvenient.

The first major design improvement to the metronome came in 1812, when Dietrich Winkel created a metronome with a new kind of pendulum. It had weights on both ends of the shaft and was pivoted around the midpoint, unlike previous designs which had used conventional pendulums. This meant that the shaft of the pendulum could be much smaller and low tempos were still easy to obtain; metronomes were no longer the size of grandfather clocks.

However, unfortunately Winkel didn't capitalise on his revolutionary idea, and Johann Nepenuk Maelzel took the idea and patented it. It was a design classic, and has been in production ever since.

Although many weird and wonderful metronome designs followed over the next century, the basic idea remained unchanged, except for the advent of miniture models and wind-up systems. Some of the stranger ideas attempted to recreate an actual conductor with a baton, or allowed the metronome to change tempo, time signature or even create dynamic events such as rubato through the use of punched cards with a metronome `program' on.

However, it was electricity that changed metronomes forever in the 1930s. Electrically-powered mechanical designs, such as the Franz model of 1938, beat out the time by powering a striking baton, while metronomes using a relaxation oscillator circuit are still very popular today (it is this method that famous metronome manufacturers such as Metrotone, Cadenzia and Wittner mainly use). Even later, in the 1970s, the proliferation of cheap, fast microchips meant that digital metronomes could be produced. Not only did these boast features such as unbeatable accuracy, they were also able to create tuning notes, adjust to different time signatures and were much smaller and more robust than anything that had been produced before. It is metronomes like these that most people are used to today. New features continue to be added, such as graphical displays and novel audio samples, but in the end, they don't really do anything more than the original models produced three centuries ago.