See also SCAPEMENT. [f. ESCAPE v. + -MENT; app. first in sense 2 after Fr. échappement.]
1. The action of escaping. rare.
1824. Hood, Two Swans, iv. Hope can spy no golden gate For sweet escapement.
1864. Sala, in Daily Tel., 19 Oct., 5/2. Wilmington, the last avenue of escapement left open to the beleaguered South.
b. A means of escape; an outlet.
1856. Froude, Hist. Eng. (1858), I. iv. 327. He allowed her to go her own way, as the best escapement of a frenzy.
1857. Livingstone, Trav., iii. 67. This little arm would prove a convenient escapement to prevent inundation.
1876. Geo. Eliot, Dan. Der., I. xi. 209. The archery ball … was not an escapement for youthful high spirits.
2. Watch and Clock-making. In a watch or clock, the mechanism that intervenes between the motive power and regulator, and that alternately checks and releases the train, thus causing an intermittent impulse to be given to the regulator.
Escapements are of various kinds, as the anchor-, chronometer-, crown-, dead-beat-, lever-, etc., escapement.
[The Fr. échappement (in quot. 1801 anglicized as echapement) occurs, as a current term in a paper dated 1716 printed in Machines approuvées par l’Académie (1735), III. 93; the etymological reference is to the regulated ‘escape’ of the toothed wheel from its detention by the pallet. The earliest instances of the word in Eng. are in the form SCAPEMENT, though at the period to which they belong the verb SCAPE was already archaic in general sense.]
[1739. Phil. Trans., XLI. 126. The teeth of the swing wheel would scape free of the pallets.
1755. Bosley’s Patent, No. 698, 4. Scapement.
1766. Cumming, Clockmaking, Index, Scapement is the means by which the action of the wheels is applied to maintain vibration.]
1779. Chambers, Cycl. (ed. Rees), Escapement, see Scapement.
1801. J. Jones, trans. Bÿggé’s Trav. Fr. Rep., xvi. 384. Breguet, the famous watchmaker, has discovered a new echapement.
1825. J. Nicholson, Operat. Mechanic, 514. From the above description of the several parts of the escapement … it will be easy to see the mode of its action.
1880. S. P. Thompson, in Nature, XXI. 398. Models of every form of escapement.
transf. 1858. O. W. Holmes, Aut. Breakf.-t., 214. Death alone can … silence at last the clicking of the terrible escapement we have carried so long beneath our wrinkled foreheads.
b. attrib., as in escapement-wheel.
1830. Kater & Lardner, Mech., xiv. 194. From the action of the pallets in checking the motion of the wheel and allowing its teeth alternately to escape, this has been called the escapement wheel.
