Verge Escapement - How IT Works

How It Works

The verge escapement consists of a wheel shaped like a crown, with sawtooth-shaped teeth protruding axially toward the front, and with its axis oriented horizontally. In front of it is a vertical rod, the verge, with two metal plates, the pallets, that engage the teeth at opposite sides of the crown wheel. The pallets are not parallel, but are oriented with an angle in between them so only one catches the teeth at a time. The balance wheel (or the pendulum) is mounted at the end of the verge rod. As the clock's gears turn the crown wheel, one of its teeth pushes on a pallet, rotating the verge in one direction, and rotating the second pallet into the path of the teeth on the opposite side of the wheel, until the tooth pushes past the first pallet. Then a tooth on the wheel's opposite side contacts the second pallet, rotating the verge back the other direction, and the cycle repeats. The result is to change the rotary motion of the wheel to an oscillating motion of the verge. Each swing of the foliot or pendulum thus allows the wheel train of the clock to advance by a fixed amount, moving the hands forward at a constant rate.

The crown wheel must have an odd number of teeth for the escapement to function. The usual angle between the pallets was 90° to 105°, resulting in a foliot or pendulum swing of around 80° to 100°. In order to reduce the pendulum's swing to make it more isochronous, the French used larger pallet angles, upwards of 115°. This reduced the pendulum swing to around 50° and reduced recoil (below), but required the verge to be located so near the crown wheel that the teeth fell on the pallets very near the axis, reducing initial leverage and increasing friction, thus requiring lighter pendulums.