David Nash on Nostr: Hard to do precisely, especially since things like altitude and nearby large masses ...

Hard to do precisely, especially since things like altitude and nearby large masses (big mountains, for example) have an appreciable effect as well, because they affect the local strength of gravity. But once pendulum clocks became accurate enough to be useful as precision timekeepers, they became precision gravimeters as well, and people figured out how this acceleration changed with latitude. Biggest effect, interestingly enough, was the Earth being oblate instead of perfectly spherical, rather than the direct change in acceleration from centripetal effects. Though of course, that shape is itself a centripetal effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Richer