At this point we ought to discuss the temperature systems that we use.
Now Fahrenheit or "F" is named after Gabriel Fahrenheit, who was born in 1686. He has a link to our man Evangelista Torricelli as he also experimented with mercury, making the first mercury thermometer, for which he also had to lay down a temperature scale of how to record the highest and lowest.
The other letter, the "C" has several claimants for it. One is Celsius, after Anders Celsius, born in 1701, who devised a slightly different scale making zero the hottest and a hundred degrees for the coldest. Another is Jean Pierre Cristin, born in 1683, who reversed this and made the zero cold. And lastly we have Centigrade, which is not named after a person at all, it simply combines two latin words, the "cent" or hundred, at one end of the scale, and the "grade", or "gradient" of the degrees.
This card introduces us to the barometer, a vital tool for recording extremes of weather, but not just for professionals, anyone can become a weather watcher with this. How it works, very briefly, is that the air moves about us constantly, and the weight is also ever changing.. This machine magically measures that weight, or pressure, and tells us.
Now the first ever barometer was created by the man on this card, Evangelista Torricelli, in 1643, quite by accident. He was trying to find out why some water refused to do what he wanted, which was simply to be pumped up a tube. He had thought of a way to do it, but was stymied, because the way he had discovered needed a glass tube that was sixty feet long. This was quite impracticable, and so, being a scientist, he decided to work on what would happen if instead of using the water he used a much heavier substance, mercury - which would require a tube of just under three feet. This was designed, and used, and it worked.
This sort of barometer is also known as a storm glass, and they were widely used in the seventeenth century. They are quite rudimentary, and you can only record the changes on a daily, rather than an hourly basis. Why they are connected with storms is that when a storm comes the air is raised into the upper atmosphere, making its pressure, or weight, drop. However when it is cold, the air is sluggish, sitting heavier above us, making its pressure less. We also know, though, that the pressure changes on a daily basis, irrespective of extremes of weather, simply due to the sun heating the atmosphere and then cooling off in the mid afternoon, and the moon being of a lower temperature, but cooling off still further under cover of darkness.
And Evangelista Torricelli also discovered a vital part of fluid dynamics, that being that the speed at which fluid leaks from a hole depends on the square root of the height of fluid which is still above that hole.
Now "Aux Deux Passages" was a department store, founded in Lyon in 1859 by a man called Henri Perrot. It started by moving into a single building at 36 Rue de la Republique, and then, by 1871, expanding to the other buildings on either side, making the full address 34-38 Rue de la Republique. Mainly it was a clothes store, but also sold toys, novelties, and household goods. It also printed regular catalogues that shoppers could take home and order from, without wasting time in the store.
In 1965 it was bought out by Printemps, a similarly aged company, founded in 1865, in fact the founder had worked at Au Bon Marche. They also have a claim to shopping fame, because they were the first company to have regular "sales" of unsold stock before the new season began. They also offered catalogues of their goods, from 1868. Their best season was Spring, after which they were named, and they would give away a small bunch of violets to anyone who made a purchase. Then, in 1881 almost the entire store burned down - and was rebuilt. A second fire followed, in 1921, after which it was again rebuilt, but this time with the added attraction of escalators. Perhaps because their story was constant change, embracing the new and modern, they set about planning major alterations to the reasonably untouched interior of Aux Deux Passages, redesigning the layout from a blank canvas, moving the walls, and removing many of the architectural features, including the huge nineteenth century stairways. This was not popular with historians though, and did not begin right until 1988. And since then, even Printemps have changed hands, several times, most recently, in 2013, when they were bought by Qatari investors.
This card is part of a set, and it is thought that the central "Nouveautes" is the set title, though that means novelties and I have a feeling they used the term more for new discoveries, in a scientific way. So far I know of few, and they are unnumbered, so I list them by the inventor`s surname. And if you know of more please tell us. Those found so far are :
- L`Abbe de L`Epee
- Archimede [s]
- Jenner
- Torricelli