If only my father was still alive. He wasn’t an engineer, but, he had an engineers mind and an appreciation of old gadgets. In his retirement years he worked with his local museum to identify obscure artifacts and their uses.
For more than a century, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have calibrated America’s measurements, setting common baselines for everything from weights to time to the fat content of milk.
The work has involved a gadgeteer’s fantasy of instruments — time standards and refractometers, galvanometers and magne-gages, thousands of tools that make measurement possible. Yet even as NIST became the world’s preeminent source of quantification, they simply lost track of what some of those old instruments did.
“Often a scientist retired or left NIST, and someone was cleaning out their office and found an instrument on the shelves and there was no documentation,” said NIST digital services librarian Regina Avila. “They would give them to our museum guy and say, ‘I found this. It looks important and we don’t want to toss it.’”
Read the rest and go through the pictures. Perhaps someone on the interwebs can help NIST identify their mystery tools
