Ritchie-Haskell Water Current Meter
date: label: date made
content: after 1888
name: label: maker
content: E. S. Ritchie & Sons
notes: label: Description
content: Eugene Elwin Haskell graduated from Cornell University in 1879 and spent a few years with the U.S. Lake Survey. He then joined the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey and was assigned the task of plotting the currents in New York Harbor. Working with Edward S. Ritchie, a leading navigational instrument maker in Massachusetts, Haskell developed a horizontal-axis, screw-type current meter with a direction-indicating facility, the results of which could be read electrically. By 1888, the Survey was favoring the Ritchie-Haskell form, noting that these new meters “combine, in one instrument, a means of registering by electricity the velocity of a current and the direction of its flow” and that the “registration is made on the vessels deck without removing the instrument from the water.”
label: Description
content: This example is marked “E.S. Ritchie & Sons, Brookline, Mass. U.S.A.” The National Bureau of Standards, the organization that calibrated current meters for federal agencies and engineers in private practice, transferred it to the Smithsonian in 1959.
label: Description
content: Ref: E. E. Haskell, “Ship’s Log,” U.S. Patent 384362 (1888).
label: Description
content: <i>Report of the Superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey for the Fiscal Year Ending June 1888</i> (Washington, D.C., 1889), p. 37.
label: Description
content: “The Ritchie-Haskell Direction-Current Meter,” <i>Engineering News</i> 33 (1895): 27-28.
label: Description
content: Arthur H. Frazier, <i>Water Current Meters in the Smithsonian Collections of the National Museum of History and Technology</i> (Washington, D.C., 1974), pp. 64-67.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: Massachusetts, Brookline
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Physical Sciences
label: See more items in
content: Water Currents
label: See more items in
content: Measuring & Mapping
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: National Bureau of Standards
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: PH.316590
label: accession number
content: 225869
label: catalog number
content: 316590
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Water Current Meter
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 23 1/2 in; 59.69 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall in case: 22 3/4 in x 12 1/2 in x 8 in; 57.785 cm x 31.75 cm x 20.32 cm