The Foucault Pendulum of the Phanar Greek Orthodox College in Istanbul: The First in Istanbul?

Foucault’s pendulum is one of the most important scientific achievements of the French physicist Léon Foucault. The performance of the experiment in 1851 was the first tangible proof of the Earth’s rotation. The relative technical simplicity and beauty of the experiment led to many repetitions of it, the manufacture of related pendulums by scientific instrument manufacturers, and the permanent or temporary installation of such pendulums in educational institutions for teaching as well as aesthetic reasons. The Phanar Greek Orthodox College in İstanbul is the oldest operating school of the city’s Greek community. After many moves during the first four centuries of its operation, the College found a permanent home in an impressive privately owned building in Fener in 1881. The building hosts a rich collection of scientific instruments, acquired mainly in the last quarter of the 19th century by French manufacturers and at the beginning of the 20th by Germans and Austrians. In 1912 special changes were made to the building to house a Foucault pendulum which was manufactured by the German company Max Kohl. This paper presents the history of this device, which is one of the first (perhaps the first) used in the Ottoman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]