Lambert Water Meter

Description:

This is a frost-proof disc water meter with serial number 1,193,509 that fit a ⅝” pipe, and that was made by the Thomson Meter Company in Brooklyn, New York, probably in the 1920s.

John Thomson, a prolific Scottish-born inventor raised in the United States, was one of the first Americans to realize the advantages of a disc water meter. In the mid-1880s, Thomson met Frank Lambert, a French machinist in Brooklyn who had designed a typewriter with the letters arranged on a nutating disc. Working together, the two men designed a water meter featuring a nutating disk. The Water-Waste Prevention Company was then formed, and reorganized as the Thomson Meter Company in 1891. With Lambert as its president, Thomson Meter introduced the Lambert in 1898, claiming that the new model “embodied all the improvements which the tests of time and long service have proved to be requisite in a perfect meter.” Despite this early claim, Lambert would go on to suggest dozens of improvements, many of them designed to make the meter frost proof, over the course of the next several decades. This particular meter is equipped with the “Yielding Fastening for Joints” for which Lambert received a patent (#1,377,986I in 1921. The Neptune Meter Company acquired Thomson Meter in 1925 and was still offering Lambert meters in the late 1930s.

Ref: Thomson Meter Co., (1923).

Date Made: 1920s

Maker: Thomson Meter Company

Location: Currently not on view

Place Made: United States: New York, Brooklyn

Subject: Water

Subject:

See more items in: Medicine and Science: Physical Sciences, Natural Resources, Water Meters, Measuring & Mapping

Exhibition:

Exhibition Location:

Credit Line: A.A. Hirsch

Data Source: National Museum of American History

Id Number: PH.325858Accession Number: 245003Catalog Number: 325858

Object Name: water meter

Physical Description: bronze (overall material)

Guid: http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ad-5cb5-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa

Record Id: nmah_1411549

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