"Diedrich Nikolaus Winkel (Lippstatt, Germany, 1773 - Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1826) was an extraordinary craftsman and inventor, but a lousy salesman. He came to live in Amsterdam in 1800 as a producer of some very fine mechanical musical instruments. He will be remembered by two inventions: the aforementioned Metronome and the famous Componium.
"In 1814 Winkel made the first usable metronome by adding two weights to a pendulum: a bigger one below and a lighter slideable one on the other
side. All other attempts before to make an audible time-measurer stranded on the necessity of making pendulums of more than two meters
length for slow rhythms.
"The original of the first metronome can be seen in the Municipal Museum in The Hague, Netherlands, and it can be seen there that the modern construction is still almost the same, albeit somewhat smaller in dimensions."
SOURCE:
http://mmd.foxtail.com/Archives/Digests/199808/1998.08.20.08.html=========
"The metronome was invented in about 1812 by Dietrich Nikolaus Winkler in Amsterdam, but a Johann Nepomuk Maelzel copied the device, added a scale of tempo divisions to the stick of the compound pendulum, and patented the device as a "metronome." To this day it is known as a Maelzel Metronome, and a notation on a musical score of "M.M. = 80", informs the musician that the Maelzel Metronome should be set to a rate of 80 beats per minute.
"Most interestingly, however, long before the invention of the metronome, as early as 1592 the Venetian Lodovico Zacconi, in his Prattica di musica , gauged tempo by using the human pulse as a reference..."
SOURCE:
http://members.aol.com/donnl/oddities.html=========
"Daniel d'Quincy is the inventor of the "Harmonic Metronome," U.S. Patent #5,515,764. The Harmonic Metronome incorporates pitch into the normal functions of the musical metronome. It measures and plays rhythm AND pitch."
SOURCE:
http://www.wholarts.com/music/ed/danield.htm
