Instrument Making
In 1881 Immisch obtained a patent for a remarkably small watch-shaped thermometer, functioning on the variable expansive properties of fluid in a Bourdon tube. This metallic instrument was designed to be more robust than contemporary glass thermometers filled with mercury - for this reason it was first branded as an 'avitreous', or metallic thermometer. The speed of the temperature-expansion and the calibration of the watch-dial indicator allowed very accurate readings to be taken, and its small size made it highly portable as a clinical instrument.
Hundreds of Immisch thermometers were tested for accuracy at the Kew Observatory every year after its launch. It was awarded a Silver Medal at the International Medical Congress of 1881 and received awards at the Inventions Exhibition of 1885 in London, as well as the Exposition Universelle in Antwerp and the Gewerbe und Industrie Ausstellung in Görlitz, also in 1885.
Its small size made the device very popular and it was referred to in many medical journals throughout the 1880s both in England and in the US.
Immisch himself later wrote an article comparing the merits of his thermometer with others then in use for the New York Medical Journal in 1889.
Read more about this topic: Moritz Immisch
Famous quotes containing the words instrument and/or making:
“Reason is man’s faculty for grasping the world by thought, in contradiction to intelligence, which is man’s ability to manipulate the world with the help of thought. Reason is man’s instrument for arriving at the truth, intelligence is man’s instrument for manipulating the world more successfully; the former is essentially human, the latter belongs to the animal part of man.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)
“her fine blades making the air wince
but her cargo
no promise then:
delivered
palpable
ours.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)