Weather Glass
name: label: maker
content: Oswego County Bank
notes: label: Description
content: This curious weather instrument contains two devices. On one side is a liquid-in-glass thermometer. 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. An inscription reads “J. A. Pool / Manufacturer / Oswego, N.Y." The firm traded as The Oswego Thermometer Works.
label: Description
content: The inventor of the chemical weather glass 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: Ad for “Pool’s Signal Service Barometer” in <i>The American Stationer</i> 13 (Nov. 4, 1883): 52.
label: Description
content: Negretti & Zambra, A Treatise on Meteorological Instruments (London, 1864), pp. 136-138.
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
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.322300
label: accession number
content: 247190
label: catalog number
content: 322300
objectType: label: Object Name
content: weather glass
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 23 cm x 8 cm x 1.8 cm; 9 1/16 in x 3 5/32 in x 23/32 in
label: Measurements
content: overall: 9 1/2 in x 3 1/8 in x 7/8 in; 24.13 cm x 7.9375 cm x 2.2225 cm