The Early Chronograph - Pendulums, Paper, and String

The Bullet:In

When you hear the word chronograph, what do you picture? Do you see a watch, hung on a chain in someone’s pocket? I do too. But for the purposes of this story, we’d both be wrong.

I’m here to talk about the kind of chronograph used to judge bullet velocity.

Still, for the purposes of this story, time, distance, and velocity are all important… so we’re also going to talk about telling time too. But not with watches.

For a great deal of time, firearms were shot with little knowledge of just how fast the bullet was going. In 1742, Benjamin Robins set out to find that knowledge with a pendulum and a dream. Before too long, Grobert’s pair of wheels took over as the go-to method for judging velocity. Then Reverend Francis Bashforth devised a long series of strings that could tell artillery operators how projectiles were flying down range.

Long before the optical, magnetic, or radar chronographs, these early mechanical designs achieved surprising accuracy using complex math and simple physics.

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