Credit: ©The Royal Society
    Image number: RS.15595

    Portable barometer and a device to measure the height of mercury

    Date
    6 December 1697
    Creator
    Unknown, Artist
    Object type
    Archive reference number
    Manuscript page number
    p4
    Material
    Dimensions
    height (page): 135mm
    width (page): 180mm
    Subject
    Content object
    Description
    The design on the left is one of a portable barometer, from a letter from William Derham to Hans Sloane dated 6 December 1697. A.A.A.A. indicates a tripod; B.B.B. the frame or case with the barometer and cistern in it, represented by dotted (‘pricked’) lines; C.C. the weather-plates.

    The drawing on the right, shown to Derham by a friend, is of a glass tube, bent diagonally to make fine measurements of the height of the mercury in the barometer.

    Both figures were printed with Derham's letter in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 20, no. 236 (1698).
    Object history
    Printed in W. Derham, ‘Giving an Account of Some Experiments about the Height of the Mercury in the Barometer, at Top and Bottom of the Monument: and about Portable Barometers’, Phil. Trans. vol. 20, no. 236 (January 1698), pp. 2-4, figs 9 & 10.
    Related fellows
    William Derham (1657 - 1735, British) , Naturalist
    Hans Sloane (1660 - 1753, Irish) , Physician
    Associated place
    <The World>
       > Europe
          > United Kingdom
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