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Introducing myself in a few words is a difficult exercise, so I apologize in advance for the length of the text that follows. Conciseness in writing has never been one of my first qualities. Moreover, these few words are not so much intended to detail my career as to present my motivations and what led me to create this website which will hopefully enrich the knowledge of those who will consulte it.
But let's start with the basics.
My name is Augustin Gomand, I am a graduate of Ecole Centrale Paris (class of 2019) and I am presently working as a research engineer in computational fluid mechanics at ArianeGroup.
Passionate about the history of science and technology, my main interests are primitive electric clocks, scientific instruments and old technical objects in general - calculating machines, computers, etc., which I have been collecting since I was fifteen.
My passion for sciences and their history has without any doubt a family origin. This heritage comes from my grandfathers, my father, but also from one of my great grandfathers, a physicist and chemist, who also collected clocks and other scientific apparatus. The remains of his collection, unfortunately dispersed at the end of the 1980's, were certainly the first pieces of interest that I could observe and have in my hands.
Following in the footsteps of my ancestors, I developed a strong desire to build up a scientific and technical collection of my own, although it differs a bit in the nature of the pieces gathered.
I started by taking an interest in traditional mechanical clocks and buying small "tic-tac" alarm clocks (here is an excellent website on this type of alarm clock) that my paternal grandfather also collected. Although my interest in this type of clocks has now slown down, I sometimes buy one in a flea market to save it from a bad fate.
My interest gradually shifted to mouvements de Paris and 19th century portico clocks, before taking another direction in 2010 following the purchase of my first electric clock. I then discovered the unusual world of electric clocks, unknown to most amateur and professional clockmakers, and quickly developed a keen interest in this field.
The main of my current clock collection consists of primitive electric clocks, most of which date from the first quarter of the 20th century. The fascination of these mechanisms is that they mix mechanics and electricity with remarkable ingenuity at a time when theoretical knowledge of electricity was still very low and none of the modern electronic components, such as the transistor, existed.
In parallel to my growing interest in this type of clockmaking, I continued to buy more traditional, mechanical, but more atypical pieces, which led me to acquire in October 2020 the Simon Le Noir mechanism which is the subject of this website.
I would not be completely honest if I said that I bought this mechanism simply out of curiosity. Some years ago, I already had in my hands a Langlois seconds regulator, identical to the construction proposed by Huygens in the Horologium Oscillatorium, which had incited me to undertake some research on the first pendulum clocks. The photos of the sale of Le Noir's movement clearly showed some particularities of the mechanism which distinguished it quite clearly from the mechanisms of the same period - in particular the fusee. It was on the basis of these elements and the anecdote reported in Tardy's dictionary that I bought the mechanism, with the ulterior motive that it might indeed be a significant piece of history as the anecdote suggests.
Here I believe it is important to clarify one point.
My rigorous scientific formation leads me today to practice a profession where subjectivity has no place and where only objective data are manipulated - we cannot discuss the figures but only their interpretation. The scientific approach consists in starting from a set of axioms and rules, and in building deductions and propositions from these basic "bricks", in short the most classical inference process there is. Unfortunately we meet today many "scientists" who are strangers to this approach and who proceed in reverse, starting from the conclusions they wish to reach in order to build a falacious reasoning, which will be inherently oriented, subjective and in no way faithful to the scientific approach. Of course, there is no question of applying this "method" here: the question is not to prove the veracity of Tardy's anecdote but to question it, just as it is not a question of proving that Le Noir's mechanism dates from before Coster's clocks but of trying to date it on the basis of objective elements, independently of the content of the anecdote.
Of course I would be very happy to show that Le Noir was the first to make pendulum clocks after Galileo, but I would be just as satisfied on the scientific level if my conclusions do not go in this direction (as my first analyses seem to show), as I truly belive the value of such a study lies not so much in its final conclusions as in the rigor of the approach followed and in the new information that has been extracted.
I cannot overemphasize my objective, which is above all to transmit knowledge and analyses, which I hope will be as objective as possible, on a subject that has never been studied before, but for which we now have enough elements to begin a serious and in-depth study. Intellectual honesty imposes in this context to disregard our presuppositions and to be neither conservative nor progressive but merely to analyze the facts. A debate can and will certainly take place, but always in the respect of the scientific approach. There are many who think they can impose their point of view by using and abusing inappropriate rhetoric instead of real argumentation. I invite them to pass their way.
Prior to the publication of the June 2022 article, I conducted the majority of the study on my own, sometimes in discussion with other specialists in the field, but the memorandum I wrote from these analyses presents my personal view of the project which certainly remains imperfect although I always aim for the utmost objectivity. I now invite anyone who has useful information to share it with me, as well as other specialists to share their assumptions and thoughts on the subject. New ideas are often born from discussions, so I am open to any suggestion, hypothesis or analysis proposal, as long as it is rigorously formulated. I thus hope to be able to bring this project to a conclusion or, at least, to lift the veil of mystery that still covers this famous Simon Le Noir.
Augustin Gomand