Price Water Current Meter
date: label: date made
content: 1886-1894
name: label: maker
content: W. & L. E. Gurley
notes: label: Description
content: William Gunn Price designed a water current meter in 1882, obtained a patent, and asked W. & L. E. Gurley, a large instrument firm in Troy, New York, to undertake commercial production. This example is marked “W. G. PRICE / PAT. AUG. 25, 1885 / No. 21 / W. & L. E. GURLEY, TROY, N.Y.” It has a four-blade rudder, and a wheel with five conical buckets. Since it is 34 inches long, it must date from the period 1886-1894 when Gurley offered Price meters of this size. 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: William Gunn Price, “Current Meter,” U.S. Patent 325011 (1885).
label: Description
content: W. & L. E. Gurley, <i>Manual of the Principal Instruments Used in American Engineering and Surveying</i> (Troy, N.Y., 1891), pp. 234-239.
label: Description
content: Arthur H. Frazier, <i>William Gunn Price and the Price Current Meters</i> (Washington, D.C., 1967), p. 50.
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. 78-87.
place: label: place made
content: United States: New York, Troy
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Physical Sciences
label: See more items in
content: Water Currents
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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.316591
label: accession number
content: 225869
label: catalog number
content: 316591
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Water Current Meter
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 34 in; x 86.36 cm