Christiaan Huygens

Christiaan Huygens was born into a wealthy Dutch family in 1629. Fascinated by astronomy, he constructed his own powerful telescope and discovered one of Saturn’s moons – later called TITAN. Huygens also realized that what Galileo had described as “ears” on the side of Saturn were actually rings circling the planet.

Huygens improved the accuracy of his pendulum clock. Drawings of Saturn from Huygens’s Systema Saturnium

The multitalented scientist who made DISCOVERIES in many areas of science

the wor ld Although future experiments showed that Huygens’s light theory wasn’t correct, his work established the idea that light is a wave. How he changed…

Making waves

In 1657, Huygens designed a clock with a PENDULUM, vastly improving accuracy by reducing the loss of time from 15 minutes a day to just 15 seconds. However, he is perhaps best known for his theory of light, published in 1690. In contrast to the theory that light is composed of particles, Huygens proposed that light travels in waves through a substance called ether. This theory enabled him to explain both reflection and refraction (bending) of light.