Chemical Weather Glass
notes: label: Description
content: This curious device contains two instruments. On one side is a liquid-in-glass thermometer with scale that reads from -10° to +128° F. On the other side is a chemical weather glass. This is a glass tube filled with a colored liquid with an excess of solute such that the quantity of crystals is a function of temperature. The inscription at the top reads “STANDARD BAROMETER” The “CHAS. E. LARGE / Brookline, N.Y.” at the bottom refers to Charles E. Large (1849-1923), a thermometer maker who, as a young man, worked with his father, Joseph T. Large.
label: Description
content: The chemical weather glass, also known as a simple storm glass, consists of a sealed glass vessel containing a salt in solution, so designed that the state of crystallization was said to indicate some aspect of the weather. The inventor is unknown, but the form was widely known in Europe and the United States by the middle years of the nineteenth century. A British scientist named Charles Tomlinson conducted experiments and found that “the storm-glass acts as a rude kind of thermoscope, inferior, for most purposes of observation, to the thermometer.”
label: Description
content: Ref: Charles Tomlinson, “An Experimental Examination of the so-called Storm-glass,” <i>The Philosophical Magazine</i> 26 (1863): 93-109.
label: Description
content: Anita McConnell and Philip Collins, “Will the True Originator of the Storm Glass Please Own Up,” <i>Ambix</i> 53 (2013): 67–75
label: Description
content: Ref: Negretti & Zambra, A Treatise on Meteorological Instruments (London, 1864), pp. 136-138.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: New York, Brooklyn
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Physical Sciences
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: PH.322298
label: catalog number
content: 322298
label: accession number
content: 247190
objectType: label: Object Name
content: chemical weather glass
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 2.8 cm x 8 cm x 22.5 cm; 1 1/8 in x 3 1/8 in x 8 7/8 in
label: Measurements
content: overall: 9 1/16 in x 3 1/8 in x 1 in; 23.01875 cm x 7.9375 cm x 2.54 cm