Chemical Weather Glass
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. The inscription reads “Baroskop.”
label: Description
content: The storm glass, or chemical weather 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: 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.327559
label: accession number
content: 317962
label: catalog number
content: 327559
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Chemical Weather Glass
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 32 cm x 8.9 cm x 2.5 cm; 12 19/32 in x 3 1/2 in x 31/32 in
label: Measurements
content: overall: 12 1/2 in x 3 1/2 in x 1 in; 31.75 cm x 8.89 cm x 2.54 cm