This is a disc water meter with split case and serial number 1,001,326 that fit a 1.5” pipe, and that was made by the Thomson Meter Company, in Brooklyn, New York. It probably dates from the early 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, he met Frank Lambert, a French machinist in Brooklyn who had designed a typewriter with the letters arranged on a nutating disc. Working together, Thomson and Lambert designed a water meter featuring a nutating disk. The Water-Waste Prevention Company was formed to produce meters of this sort, and reorganized as the Thomson Meter Company in 1891. With Lambert as its president, Thomson Meter introduced the Lambert meter 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.” The Neptune Meter Company acquired Thomson Meter in 1925 and was still offering Lambert meters in the late 1930s.
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