From www2.geophysik.uni-muenchen.de/outreach/pendulum.php:
A Foucault pendulum, or Foucault's pendulum, named after the French
physicist Léon Foucault, was conceived as an experiment to demonstrate
the rotation of the Earth;
its action is a result of the Coriolis effect. It is a tall pendulum
free to oscillate in any vertical plane and ideally should include some sort of
motor so that it can run continuously rather than have its motion damped by air
resistance. The first Foucault pendulum exhibited to the public was in February
1851 in the Meridian Room of the Paris Observatory. A few weeks later, Foucault
made his most famous pendulum when he suspended a 28-kg bob with a 67-metre
wire from the dome of the Panthéon in Paris. In 1851 it was well known
that the Earth moved: experimental evidence included the aberration of
starlight, stellar parallax, and the Earth's measured polar flattening and
equatorial bulge. However Foucault's pendulum was the first dynamical proof of
the rotation in an easy-to-see experiment, and it created a justified sensation
in both the learned and everyday worlds.
At either the North Pole or South Pole, the plane of oscillation of a pendulum
remains pointing in the same direction while the Earth rotates underneath it,
taking one sidereal day to complete a rotation.
When a Foucault pendulum is
suspended somewhere on the equator, then the plane of oscillation of the
Foucault pendulum is at all times co-rotating with the rotation of the Earth.
What happens at other latitudes is a combination of these two effects. At the
equator the equilibrium position of the pendulum is in a direction that is
perpendicular to the Earth's axis of rotation. Because of that, the plane of
oscillation is co-rotating with the Earth.
Away from the equator the co-rotating with the Earth is diminished. Between the
poles and the equator the plane of oscillation is rotating both with respect to
the stars and with respect to the Earth. The direction of the plane of
oscillation of a pendulum with respect to the Earth rotates with an angular
speed proportional to the sine of its latitude; thus one at 45 degrees of
latitude rotates once every 1.4 days and one at 30 degrees every 2 days.
Many people found the sine factor difficult to understand, which prompted
Foucault to conceive the gyroscope in 1852. The gyroscope's spinning rotor
tracks the stars directly. Its axis of rotation turns once per day whatever the
latitude, unaffected by any sine factor.
A Foucault pendulum is tricky to set up because imprecise construction can
cause additional veering which masks the terrestrial effect. Air resistance
damps the oscillation, so Foucault pendulums in museums usually incorporate an
electromagnetic or other drive to keep the bob swinging.
The Foucault pendulum that hangs in the rotunda of the Lexington Public Library
in Lexington, Kentucky in the United States is the largest celing clock in the
world.
