The damping of balances

The paper gives a survey of the history of damping methods for balances. Re presentation on Egyptian drawings demonstrate that the person performing th e weighing shortened the measuring time by holding the suspension cords and touching the beam. By means of delimiters, the Romans constricted the defl ection amplitudes. In the 19th century, the movements of precision balances were damped with a brush. For analytical balances, locking mechanism were developed, often combined with levers lifting the weighing scales and the b eam in order to relieve the knife-edges. Half-arresting was used to curtail weighings. Air damping was invented by Arzberger in 1875, and eddy current damping by Marek in 1906. In electronic balances, lag, lead and filter ele ments and absorptive attenuators are used. For digital balances, the fast-r eacting nullification of eddy signals is applied.