Your Top-Mouth Erlenmeyer Klein Bottle works as a barometer.

And as a thermometer!

Yep, you can measure the atmospheric pressure and local temperature with your top-mouth Klein bottle or Drinking Mug Klein Stein.

To use your Acme Klein Bottle as a thermo-barometer, partially fill your Klein Bottle with colored water. Add enough water to cover the bottom to a depth of about 3 cm. The water level in the side arm will then rise and fall in accordance with barometric pressure and local temperature. This means that you can use it as an old-fashioned New England Weather Glass ... an uncalibrated barometer.

You can demonstrate the effect of temperature by partially filling your bottle, then placing it on a warm stovetop ... the water level in the arm will immediately rise. (be careful, since the bottle may overflow onto your stove) Indeed, just cup your hands around the upper chamber of the bottle, and may see the level slightly rise.

So what causes the change? The universal gas law, PV=nRT, says that the volume of the chamber will vary with temperature and pressure. If you keep the temperature constant, the water level will measure the air pressure. Keep the air pressure contant, and you'll measure temperature.

To help your experimental work, Acme includes a precision calibration decal, designed especially for ease of application and cheapness of manufacture.

Well, yes, there are a few minor problems, but they can be easily solved by a team of PhD physicists. First, you're measuring two independent variables with only one device. Second, you must allow for evaporation of the water, especially if you plan to use this for long term analysis. Then, too, the convoluted shape of the Klein Bottle poses an additional challenge to the experimentalist.

Already, the physical principles incorporated by our Klein Bottles barometers have been widely adopted by submarines, blimps, hot-air balloons, ships, aircraft, and trans-lunar spacecraft. Indeed, the United States Weather Services predicts the weather using instruments made from the same materials which we use.

However, as Acme has not yet fully analyzed our products, we caution you not to make life-critical decisions (such as weather prediction) based upon the analog readout. We will be better able to advise you as we receive and correlate additional reports from pilots, navigators, astronauts, and celestial mechanicians.

Incidentally, other Acme Klein Bottles can also work as barometers. You just have to mount them upside down -- for instance,. the Moebius Loop collar.

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this page last updated by Cliff on March 24, 2014

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