1758903139Code 8242a Stick BarometerEbonized wooden stick barometer signed TECNOMASIO ITALIANO, from the second half of the 19th century.
Complete with a vernier for reading atmospheric pressure variations and a mercury thermometer.
Good condition, fully functional.
Dimensions: 17 x 5 x 99.5 cm – 6.7 x 2 x 39.3 inches.
For safety during transport, the barometer will be shipped without the mercury. The mercury will be placed in a sealed container in the package with the barometer.
The "Tecnomasio Italiano" optical and precision mechanics workshop was founded on Via Pace in Milan in 1863 by Luigi Longoni, its first director, a civil engineer, mathematician, and mechanic, and a teacher at the Milan Polytechnic; Carlo Dell'Acqua, a mechanical engineer and instrument maker; and the renowned optician and surveyor Ignazio Porro, a teacher at the newly founded Milan Polytechnic, who soon retired and founded the Officina Filotecnica.
In 1871, engineer Bartolomeo Cabella, one of the first graduates of the Milan Polytechnic, became director at the age of twenty-four and just one year after joining the company.
Under Cabella's leadership, the company transformed from a respected manufacturer of precision instruments to a leading player in the national electromechanical industry, building the entire electricity distribution system for the Milan Expo in 1894.
At the height of its expansion, the company was looking for land to build a larger factory, but the advent of alternating current (AC) instead of direct current (DC) caused a crisis, which led to a merger with the Swiss company "Brown Boveri."
Thus, on November 15, 1903, "Tecnomasio Italiano Brown Boveri," also known as T.I.B.B., was founded in Milan.
After an initial phase of preparation, the search for suitable land for a new factory resumed, and the choice fell on an area of over forty thousand square meters, outside Porta Romana, in an area "that could be connected by a track to the nearby freight station"; the station was Porta Romana.
Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647), a mathematician and physicist, a disciple of Galileo, was the first, in 1643, to build a measuring instrument capable of detecting changes in pressure. Mercury was already known to the Chinese and Hindus in ancient times; it was found in Egyptian tombs dating back to around 1500 BC. From 500 BC, its use as an amalgam for other metals began. The ancient Greeks used it as a pigment for paintings, and the Romans employed it in cosmetics. According to medieval alchemists, it was the matter from which everything else was formed, and they believed that once hardened, it turned to gold. In the 18th and 19th centuries, mercury nitrate was used to remove hair from the skins used to make hats: this caused many cases of brain damage among those who made these headdresses, even leading to the coining of the phrase "mad as a hatter."
Since ancient times, humans, as farmers and navigators, have observed and attempted to predict climate change. The scientific study of atmospheric changes began in the mid-17th century, in connection with experiments aimed at demonstrating the existence of a vacuum, which ancient philosophers denied because "nature abhors a vacuum!" If you fill a long tube with water and place it upside down in a bucket of water, the column of liquid will descend until its weight is counterbalanced by the pressure of the air on the surface of the water in the bucket: at a certain point, there will be a vacuum at the upper, closed end of the tube.
