![]() The best place to obtain scientific instruments in the United States was Philadelphia, where fine equipment was both imported and made. ![]() “I could only find one Thermometer in Richmond for Sale which was short, badly graduated and at an exorbitant price.” Randolph finally resorted to using “the old Spirit of Wine Thermometer in the Study” at Monticello. “I have not a thermometer even, at present, but shall provide myself directly with one, and as soon as possible with a Barometer.” He felt the need to apologize again almost a year later: “I am sorry not to be able to give you a good account of the Diary you desired me to keep,” he wrote in April 1791. “I am sorry it is not in my power to begin immediately the course of observations you proposed in your last letter,” Randolph replied. The same limitation arose when Jefferson urged his son-in-law Thomas Mann Randolph, Jr., to keep a meteorological journal in Virginia in 1790. When Jefferson advised James Madison to start a weather journal in 1784, Madison responded that he could not begin right away because he lacked “both a Thermometer and Barometer.” Writing in January of that year, Madison’s kinsman of the same name reported from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg that when the British swept through three years earlier, they “robbed me of my Thermometer and Barometer.” Unable to get replacements yet, he had borrowed a thermometer and “I wish we had Barometer but there is no Possibility of getting one here at present.” Yet in the new United States as Jefferson began his weather diary and encouraged others to do so, it could take some doing to get the equipment needed for weather journaling. Division of the History of Science and Technology, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. In the 1700s, thermometers and barometers became more widely available, and by the latter part of that century precision instruments of high quality could be obtained by those with the means to pay for them.Ĭombination of a Fahrenheit thermometer on top (graduated from -20° to 130°, labeled as “Freezing Point” at 32°, “Temperate” at 52°, “Silk Worms” at 75°, and “Warm Baths” at 86°) and a hygrometer below (“after Saussure,” with scale of 0 to 100, “Very Dry” to “Much Rain”) with wooden case. ![]() #Meteorologist tools how to#At that time, Hooke and others were first working out how to make reliable thermometers and give them uniform graduated scales. When Robert Hooke laid down precepts for keeping a meteorological observation journal in the 1660s, few people in Britain or elsewhere had access to instruments for weather measurement. ![]()
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