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The **Foucault pendulum** was conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. It is a long pendulum that is free to oscillate in any vertical plane. The first public exhibition of a Foucault pendulum was in February 1851 in the Meridian Room of the Paris Observatory. By this time, it was already well known that the Earth moved. From the perspective of someone on Earth, the pendulum appears to change its direction of swing over time without any external force acting on it. In fact, the pendulum continues to swing in a constant plane relative to the universe, while the Earth rotates beneath it, causing the apparent shift in its swing direction.
