JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

[I apologize for the fuzziness at the top of the image here but I couldn’t get the volume of Nature flat enough on the scanner to avoid the degradation.]

In the wonderland world of early applications of electricity to anything comes this marvelous image of an electrical thermometer from Nature for March 17, 1881.The original image is only about 3″ tall, and I could not resist reproducing it in what is almost a 1:1 ratio. As pretty as it was/is, the implementation was a bit of a picture of a soggy sandwich.

Evidently the platinum screws running up the side of the thermometer (at every 3 degrees, though it could be refined to <1-degree increments), were connected to an alerting operator like a bell or some such thing.  That way, if something was being heated to a certain temperature and the temp changed, an alarm would sound, and the whole process could be viewed remotely.  Why this would be necessary I am not so sure–even the author admitted that the whole thing would be very cumbersome with the large number of insulated wires being tracked into the observing station.  In any event, the image is striking, if not the idea.