When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

The breakthrough that most enabled us to do these things came in the late 1500s, when Galileo Galilei was a nineteen-year-old medical student at the University of Pisa. Inspired by a swinging chandelier, Galileo conducted a few makeshift experiments on pendulums. He discovered that what most affected a pendulum’s motion was the length of its string—and that for any given length of string a pendulum always took the same amount of time to make one full swing. That periodicity, he concluded, made pendulums ideal timekeepers. Galileo’s insight led to the invention of pendulum clocks a few decades later. And pendulum clocks, in turn, produced something that we don’t realize is a relatively new concept: “the time.”