Lambert Water Meter
date: label: date made
content: 1920s
name: label: maker
content: Thomson Meter Company
notes: label: Description
content: This is a frost-proof disc water meter with serial number 1,193,509 that fit a ⅝” pipe, and that was made by the Thomson Meter Company in Brooklyn, New York, probably in the 1920s.
label: Description
content: John Thomson, a prolific Scottish-born inventor raised in the United States, was one of the first Americans to realize the advantages of a disc water meter. In the mid-1880s, Thomson met Frank Lambert, a French machinist in Brooklyn who had designed a typewriter with the letters arranged on a nutating disc. Working together, the two men designed a water meter featuring a nutating disk. The Water-Waste Prevention Company was then formed, and reorganized as the Thomson Meter Company in 1891. With Lambert as its president, Thomson Meter introduced the Lambert in 1898, claiming that the new model “embodied all the improvements which the tests of time and long service have proved to be requisite in a perfect meter.” Despite this early claim, Lambert would go on to suggest dozens of improvements, many of them designed to make the meter frost proof, over the course of the next several decades. This particular meter is equipped with the “Yielding Fastening for Joints” for which Lambert received a patent (#1,377,986I in 1921. The Neptune Meter Company acquired Thomson Meter in 1925 and was still offering Lambert meters in the late 1930s.
label: Description
content: Ref: Thomson Meter Co., <Circular No. 106</i> (1923).
label: Location
content: Currently not on view
place: label: place made
content: United States: New York, Brooklyn
topic: label: Subject
content: Water
setName: label: See more items in
content: Medicine and Science: Physical Sciences
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content: Natural Resources
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content: Water Meters
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content: Measuring & Mapping
creditLine: label: Credit Line
content: A. A. Hirsch
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: PH.325858
label: accession number
content: 245003
label: catalog number
content: 325858
objectType: label: Object Name
content: water meter
physicalDescription: label: Physical Description
content: bronze (overall material)