First came the "musical pendulum," with silent beats, invented in 1696 by the Frenchman Étienne Loulié (1654–1702). This indispensable device then became the "mechanical metronome with an audible pulse," patented in 1816 by Johann Nepomuk Maëlzel (1772–1838).
The German had "borrowed"—to put it mildly—the idea for this clockwork mechanism from the Dutchman Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (1780–1826). It drives a graduated pendulum whose audible beats keep time for musicians.
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The visible and hidden sides
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