learnin’ somethin new every day

For the last 4 days I’ve been in Chicago for my company’s (Roundarch) annual summer event. Since my flight back to NYC wasn’t until Sunday, I decided to visit the the Art Institute of Chicago. Having not been there before I wanted to see how well their claim of ‘being one of the largest collections of Impressionist artwork’ held up.
Truth be told, their collection is amazing, but being the weirdo I am, I became distracted with an object I kept seeing in various rooms of the museum:
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As I took a closer look at the device, I realized it was used for tracking humidity and temperature over a large span of time using a needle to register fluctuations on a large spool of paper like a seismometer (for tracking earthquake activity).
How friggin cool.
I did some quick digging and found the company who makes these hygrothermographs, Oakion.