Description

Long pointed metal rod that is flattened at the tip on one end. The other end has a slightly broader base with wires wrapped around it.

In the early 1920s, MIT chemistry professor James A. Beattie began a research project at the Research Laboratory for Physical Chemistry on thermodynamics properties of different materials. This grew into a large research project that spanned the next two decades. Manson Benedict, a master’s student at the Laboratory, was one of the many students on the project, and his work revolved around relating Centigrade temperatures to the thermodynamic temperature (a scale where 0 is defined as absolute zero, the temperature at which the kinetic energy of molecules drops to zero). For his master’s thesis, he built this instrument (from Beattie’s designs) to measure the ice point (the equilibrium temperature between ice and water at a pressure of one atmosphere) and the steam point (the equilibrium temperature between water and its vapor pressure at normal atmosphere) of water.