Thermometer
date: label: date made
content: ca 1900
notes: label: Description
content: This unusually precise mercury-in-glass thermometer was designed to measure temperatures over a very small range, especially near the melting and freezing points of substances. Ernest Otto Beckmann, a physical chemist who worked with Wilhelm Ostwald in Leipzig, described the form in 1888.
label: Description
content: This example has a long cylindrical bulb at the bottom, an s-shaped tube with auxiliary bulb at the top, and a porcelain plate carrying a scale that ranges from -.04 to +1.1 degrees Centigrade and that is graduated to 0.002 degrees. The back of the plate is marked “Centigrade” and “Thermometer n. Beckmann.” The whole is enclosed in a cylindrical glass tube with brass cap.
label: Description
content: This thermometer was used at the Johns Hopkins University, perhaps by Harry C. Jones, a chemist who received his PhD from Hopkins in 1892, spent two years working in the laboratories of Ostwald and other important European chemists, and then returned to Hopkins to teach physical chemistry. It may have been made by F. O. R. Goetze, a Leipzig firm that specialized in thermometers of this sort.
label: Description
content: Ref.: Wilhelm Ostwald, <i>Manual of Physico-Chemical Measurements</i> (London, 1894), pp. 180-182.
label: Description
content: Harry C. Jones, <i>The Elements of Physical Chemistry</i> 4th edition, revised (New York, 1915), pp. 228-230.
label: Description
content: John Servos, <i>Physical Chemistry from Ostwald to Pauling</i> (Princeton, 1990).
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Chemistry
label: See more items in
content: Thermometers and Hygrometers
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content: Measuring & Mapping
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: John Hopkins University
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: CH.315870
label: catalog number
content: 315870
label: accession number
content: 221777
objectType: label: Object Name
content: thermometer
physicalDescription: label: Measurements
content: overall: 21 1/2 in x 3/4 in; 54.61 cm x 1.905 cm
label: Measurements
content: overall: 21 3/8 in x 5/8 in; 54.2925 cm x 1.5875 cm