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This mercury-in-glass thermometer is signed 'A. Wilson 1782' in manuscript.' Alexander Wilson (1714-86) was originally a type founder with the renowned Foulis Press. However, through the patronage of Archibald Campbell, Earl of Islay and subsequently 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682-1761), Wilson became Professor of Practical Astronomy at the University of Glasgow from 1760. He had been making instruments since the 1730s, when he assisted George Martine (1702-41) in his experiments on heat: these instruments would have been thermometers and barometers.

The mercury-in-glass thermometer has a paper Fahrenheit scale.

Wilson had been in a short-lived partnership in 1758 with James Watt (1736-1819), the instrument maker who later turned engineer, and Joseph Black (1728-99), who taught chemistry at Glasgow University before moving to the chair at Edinburgh. Wilson and Watt supplied Black with thermometers during the 1760s, while he was still at Glasgow doing his pioneering work on the nature of heat. This piece, however, comes from the collections at the University of Edinburgh.

Record details

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• Online ID: 000-180-000-903-C
• Image Rights Holder: National Museums Scotland
• Project: National Museums Scotland Part 2
  Project description   View all records in project
• Ref: National Museums Scotland  T.1975.56
• Date: 1769
  1782
  
• Material: Inscription: Alexr. Wilson / 1769
  Thermometer
  
• Dimensions:
• What: Thermometer
  
• Subject: 22. PHYSICS, Heat (Departmental Classification)
  
• Who: Alexander Wilson, Glasgow (Maker)
  
• Where: Scotland, Lanarkshire, Glasgow
  
• Event:
• Description: Thermometer, 0 - 240 degrees Fahrenheit, signed by Alexander Wilson of Glasgow, 1769
  
• References:
  • Anderson, R.G.W. The Playfair Collection and the Teaching of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh 1713-1858 (Edinburgh, 1978), pp 20-22, 26, 158. 
  • Emerson, Roger L. Politics and the Glasgow Professors, 1690-1800. In Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (eds.), The Glasgow Enlightenment. East Linton, 1995, pp 21-39. 
  • Morrison-Low, A.D. Sold at Sotheby's: Sir John Findlay's cabinet and the Scottish antiquarian tradition. Journal of the history of Collections 7 (1995), pp 197-209. 
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