Description Of An Automatic Registering And Printing Barometer
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Description Of An Automatic Registering And Printing Barometer
G. W. Hough
J. Munsell, 1865
Science; Earth Sciences; Meteorology & Climatology; Science / Earth Sciences / Meteorology & Climatology
George Washington Hough was an American astronomer.
Background
Hough was born in Montgomery, New York in 1836. The son of William and Magdalene (Selmser) Hough, he was descended from German ancestors who were early settlers in the Mohawk Valley.
The boy evidently grew up with the idea of becoming an astronomer. It is said that he devised a contrivance of fish poles to measure the right ascensions and declinations of the stars when he was nine years old. His mechanical genius, inherited from his father, found early expression in the harnessing of the brook to run his mother's churn.
Education
He attended school at Waterloo and Seneca Falls, N. Y. , and then entered Union College. He graduated in 1856 with high honors. He then took a year of graduate work in mathematics and engineering at Harvard University.
Career
He taught school in Dubuque, Iowa, for two years. In 1859 he went to the Cincinnati Observatory as assistant astronomer under O. M. Mitchel, and in the following year he went with Mitchel to the Dudley Observatory, where he succeeded the latter as director in 1862 and remained until 1874.
From 1874 until 1879 he was engaged in commercial pursuits, then in 1879 he was appointed director of the Dearborn Observatory, holding this position for the last thirty years of his life. At the Dudley Observatory Hough's systematic astronomical and meteorological observations suggested many instrumental improvements. He invented a machine for mapping and cataloguing stars, and in 1865 he invented his recording and printing barometer in which the rising and falling of a float, resting on the surface of the mercury, was transmitted electrically to the recording device. He also devised a simpler machine, called the meteorograph, which registered the height of the barometer and the temperatures by the wet and dry bulb thermometers.
Another important invention was his automatic anemometer for recording the direction and velocity of the wind. His study of batteries led him to the substitution of lead for copper in the Daniell cell and to the conclusion that the current in the exterior circuit depended on the specific gravity of the zinc sulphate. He was also interested in photography and invented a sensitometer for testing plates. In Chicago he perfected his printing chronograph and when the Dearborn Observatory was moved to Evanston he had the great dome built on new and original plans, applied an electric control to the telescope, and devised a very convenient observing chair.
In 1869 the Dudley Observatory fitted out an expedition to observe the solar eclipse at Matoon, Ill. Hough, who was chief of the party, made at that time the first accurate record of the duration of "Baily's Beads. " As early as 1867 he had become interested in double stars and had measured a few close pairs at the Dudley Observatory. At the Dearborn Observatory he found S. W. Burnham measuring double stars with the 181/2-inch telescope. He became fired with Burnham's zeal for this field of observation with the result that he measured a large number, paying especial attention to very difficult pairs, and discovered over six hundred new ones. It was at Dearborn, too, that he began and carried on throughout the rest of his life the systematic observation of the surface details of Jupiter.