Thermometer

Description:

This unusually precise mercury-in-glass thermometer measured temperatures over a very small range, especially near the melting and freezing points of substances. Ernest Otto Beckmann, a physical chemist who worked with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig, described the form in 1888.

This example has a long cylindrical bulb at the bottom, an s-shaped tube with auxiliary bulb at the top, and a porcelain plate carrying a scale that ranges from -.04 to +1.1 degrees Centigrade and that is graduated to 0.002 degrees. The back of the plate is marked “Centigrade” and “Thermometer n. Beckmann.” The whole is enclosed in a cylindrical glass tube with brass cap.

This thermometer was used at the Johns Hopkins University, perhaps by Harry C. Jones, a chemist who received his PhD from Hopkins in 1892, spent two years working in the laboratories of Ostwald and other important European chemists, and then returned to Hopkins to teach physical chemistry. It may have been made by F. O. R. Goetze, a Leipzig firm that specialized in thermometers of this sort.

Ref.: Wilhelm Ostwald, Manual of Physico-Chemical Measurements (London, 1894), pp. 180-182.

Harry C. Jones, The Elements of Physical Chemistry 4th edition, revised (New York, 1915), pp. 228-230.

John Servos, Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling (Princeton, 1990).

Date Made: ca 1900

Location: Currently not on view

See more items in: Medicine and Science: Chemistry, Thermometers and Hygrometers, Measuring & Mapping

Exhibition:

Exhibition Location:

Credit Line: John Hopkins University

Data Source: National Museum of American History

Id Number: CH.315870Catalog Number: 315870Accession Number: 221777

Object Name: thermometer

Measurements: overall: 21 1/2 in x 3/4 in; 54.61 cm x 1.905 cmoverall: 21 3/8 in x 5/8 in; 54.2925 cm x 1.5875 cm

Guid: http://n2t.net/ark:/65665/ng49ca746ad-8ccd-704b-e053-15f76fa0b4fa

Record Id: nmah_1421373

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