Matthaus Hipp’s short duration timer, c.1900

In depth

Matthӓus Hipp’s weight-driven electric chronoscope can measure intervals in thousandths of a second. First recorded in writing in 1848, Hipp’s design drew on and developed a model unveiled in 1840 by British engineer Sir Charles Wheatstone. However, Hipp’s design was more successful, partly because he accounted for the natural inertia of the clock movement: in the Hipp Chronoscope, since the train is started before the timer, the measurement is taken with a train of wheels already running at a constant velocity.

The Hipp Chronoscope had almost immediate scientific ramifications. Hipp lent an early model to the director of Neuchatel’s Astronomical Observatory, Adolph Hirsch (1830-1901), who used it to prove the concept of ‘physiological time’ (later ‘reaction time’) over a series of experiments (in some of which Hipp himself served as a subject). Hirsch observed several phenomena that are still accepted today, including differences in time for different sensory responses – audio, visual and tactile. His observations were initially used to correct for varying reaction times in the observation of star transits, but they also fed into contemporary developments in psychiatry and physiology.

Born in Blaureuren in 1813, the son of a baker, Hipp was apprenticed to a clockmaker in his teens, and began investigating electromagnetism in the 1840s. Like many pioneers within electrical horology, he worked across several burgeoning technologies. He also created a ‘writing telegraph’, and his ‘Hipp toggle’ was instrumental in the development of electric clocks [see TCW 1035]. Around 100 of his chronoscopes are known to have been made. Most of those that survive are in the collections of scientific institutions. This example is numbered ‘No. 17757’ and the dial is signed ‘Peyer Favarger & Co | Neuchatel Suisse’. Both suggest a date of c.1889-1908. In 1889, the ailing Hipp had entrusted the management of his company to the engineers von Peyer and Favarger; shortly afterwards, Hipp and his wife moved to Zurich, where Hipp died on 3 May 1893. Von Peyer and Favarger continued to iterate on the chronoscope over the following decades, first under the company name ‘Favarger’ and later ‘FAVAG’.