Near the start of August of 1815, a box was delivered to the offices of the Royal Dutch Institute of the Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam containing the prototype of a novel musical timekeeper and a letter describing the apparatus. It had been posted by a thirty-eight-year-old named Dietrich Nikolaus Winkel (1777–1826), a clockmaker from the small, rural German town of Lippstadt, Westphalia, north of the Ruhr Valley, who had since emigrated to the Dutch capital. Winkel had been born to a clockmaker, though by the time he was five both his mother and father were dead. Little else is known about Winkel’s early life, beyond his being an orphan and a Lutheran, and his becoming a free citizen in 1799, following the completion of a clock making apprenticeship. Only in 1816 do his whereabouts again resurface, the year he moved from a house located north of central Amsterdam to a purchased house in the Reguliersgracht on the opposite side of the city center.

How long Winkel had already been living in the capital by this point is no better understood than his specific reason for coming here. Whether he was aware that Amsterdam had been attracting a steady flow of newcomers for a century, a consequence of its openness to immigrant populations, Winkel was certainly operating under the assumption that such an environment offered a budding clockmaker far more opportunity than provincial Lippstadt. Curiously, the prototype itself provides one critical piece of information regarding Winkel’s whereabouts, for here the inventor had affixed an inscription reading “Discovered by D. N. Winkel on 27 November 1814 in Amsterdam.” This suggests that he had been living in the city for some time prior to purchasing his house in the Reguliersgracht and gives us pause to wonder if his pendulum might have been the inspiration behind his move to the city in the first place?

The instrument Winkel presented to the Royal Dutch Institute was, in essence, an inverted or double-weighted pendulum, a radical approach destined with time to revolutionize musical timekeeping, although who or what initially inspired his design has been lost to us.