Chronoscope
- Maker: Peyer Favarger & Cie (manufacturer), Mattheüs Hipp (inventor)
- Date: after 1893
- Location: Neuchatel, Switzerland
- Collection: History of Medicine / Van Biervliet
Who was Hipp?
The chronoscope is named after its designer, Matthaüs Hipp (1813-1893).
Who used this chronoscope?
This chronoscope was used by the first professor of psychology at Ghent University, Jules Van Biervliet (1859-1945). He mainly used it to measure the response time to sensory stimuli. In 1891, he founded the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology in Ghent, in an age when psychology was separating off from philosophy and becoming more ‘scientific’.
Why measure response times?
At the end of the 19th century, psychology aimed to mirror the natural sciences in order to get rid of its reputation as a vague discipline. It needed to be possible to express psychological research results in objective figures. An important method for ‘measuring’ the mind was the response time measurement. After all, it had been discovered in the 19th century that thought processes and nerve impulses took time. That time could be recorded by measuring the interval between the stimulus and the response.
How does the chronoscope work?
The chronoscope works like a giant stopwatch. Controlled by a small weight and two electromagnets, the device can measure very short time intervals. Hipp’s model is accurate to a thousandth of a second. However, the device did make a lot of noise, so it was often put in a different room to the room where the test subject was located during experiments. The test subject would then use a telegraph key connected to the chronoscope to indicate their response.
