Foucault pendulum

The Foucault Pendulum is a joint project of the Lublin Conference Center and School Complex No. 1 named after Władysław Grabski in Lublin. The creator and builder of the pendulum is Mr. Ireneusz Maksim, a physics teacher with great passion. 

The Foucault Pendulum serves to illustrate the Earth’s rotational motion. The slow change in the pendulum’s plane of motion relative to the Earth proves its rotation around its own axis. The pendulum is named after the French physicist J. B. L. Foucault, who first conducted this experiment in 1851 at the Paris Observatory. One hundred years later, the Foucault Pendulum made its debut in Poland. In June 1949, the first demonstration of the pendulum in the country took place at the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Kraków.

The Lublin project is a unique invention on a global scale because, unlike other pendulums in Poland, it has a variable mass, which can be adjusted by adding or removing weights. The pendulum was built using recycled materials, including brake discs, a gym barbell, and scrap metal components found in a junkyard as part of eco-friendly initiatives.

The pendulum structure installed in the Lublin Conference Center consists of a 25-meter-long steel cable and a metal weight with an adjustable mass ranging from 20 to 28 kilograms. The time required for the full rotation of the pendulum’s oscillation plane at the LCC is approximately 30 hours, 46 minutes, and 30 seconds. 

The inaugural demonstration of the pendulum took place on September 15, 2019, during the Science Picnic at the Lublin Science Festival. Currently, demonstrations of the Foucault Pendulum can be seen at the Lublin Conference Center from Monday to Friday, between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM, upon prior telephone appointment at +48 81 718 09 00.