BARODA 



597 



BAROMETER 



the time he was thirteen worked for his living. 

 At the age of eighteen he went into the lottery 

 business; in the next year he married secretly 

 and soon began to edit the Danbury Herald of 

 Freedom. 



In 1834 he removed to New York, where he 

 entered upon his first venture as a showman, 

 buying Joice Heth, the reputed colored nurse 

 of General Washington, and exhibiting her with 

 considerable profit. After 1839 he was reduced 

 again to poverty, but in 1841 he bought Scud- 

 der's American Museum in New York, through 

 which he became at once prosperous by exhib- 

 iting various fraudulent freaks and curios, and 

 also a noted dwarf (Charles S. Stratton of 

 Bridgeport), whom he styled Gen. Tom Thumb. 

 In 1847 he offered Jenny Lind $1,000 a night 

 for 150 nights, and received $700,000 the con- 

 cert tickets often being sold at auction, in one 

 case as high as $650 for a single ticket. In pre- 

 senting this marvelous singer to American audi- 

 ences he performed a distinct service to music 

 lovers (see LIND, JENNY). 



Soon, however, he was again bankrupt, but 

 immediately entered upon new enterprises and 

 made another fortune. His greatest venture 

 was his traveling museum, menagerie and cir- 

 cus, known as the "Greatest Show on Earth," 

 which required 500 men and horses and 100 

 railroad cars to transport it. He paid $10,000 to 

 the London Zoological society for the huge ele- 

 phant, "Jumbo." This traveling circus was the 

 forerunner of the later great traveling com- 

 panies of like character. Barnum published 

 several books, including an autobiography, 

 which tells frankly of many of his audacious 

 frauds. 



BARODA, baro'da, an important city of 

 I mini, a trade center for the surrounding coun- 

 try, which has an abundant yield of grain, flax, 

 cotton and tobacco. It is also the capital of 

 >tatc of the same name, and is a fortified 

 city, situated 248 miles north of Bombay. 

 Tin re are several fine buildings and educational 

 institutions. Since 1802 the state has been trib- 

 utary to Great Britain, but is nominally gov- 



1 by* a native ruler called the gad 

 one of the richest and moet powerful of Indian 

 potentates. Population of the state is 1,952,- 

 692; of th. town. 103,790. 



BAROMETER, barom'cter, an instrument 

 for n-ronliiiK atmospheric pressure, used chiefly 

 in foresting weather and in measuring height- 

 of mountains (see AIR). If you take a glass 

 tube something over thirty inches long and 

 closed at one end, fill it with mercury, put your 



Vacuum 



FIG. 1 



thumb over the open end as shown in Fig. 1 a 

 and insert this end in a cup of mercury as in 

 Fig. 1 b, the liquid in the tube will fall until its 

 top is only about 

 thirty inches 

 above the surface 

 of the liquid in 

 the cup. If you 

 were to admit air 

 to the vacuum 

 above the mer- 

 cury by breaking 

 open the top of 

 the tube, the mer- 

 cury would fall 

 until it reached 

 the same level in 

 the tube as in the 

 cup. So long as 

 the tube remains 

 air-tight there is 

 no weight press- 

 ing on the mer- 

 cury in it, and 

 the fluid is thrust 

 upward by that 

 in the cup, which is under pressure from the 

 atmosphere. This is the experiment which 

 Torricelli, a pupil of Galileo, made in 1643; 

 from it he learned that the weight of all the 

 air above any point is equal to the weight of a 

 column of mercury about thirty inches high. 

 See TORRICELLI. 



Measuring Altitude with a Barometer. Not 

 long after Torricelli's experiment was first per- 

 formed, scientists realized that if it were truly 

 the weight of the air which supported the fluid 

 in the tube, the mercury would fall farther 

 upon a mountain top, where there was less air 

 above it. Pascal proved this to be true, and 

 the mercury tube was given the name barom- 

 eter, which means pressure-measure. Since 

 then barometers of all sorts have been helpful 

 in measuring heights, and when you read that 

 an aeroplane pilot has reached a height of 

 10,000 feet you may know that this figure was 

 I. uned from his barometer. 



The Barometer and the Weather. The ba- 

 rometer has made possible the modern science 

 of weather predicting. When the mercury falls 

 rapidly a storm is quite sure to follow, while a 

 ;iig barometer" foretells fair weather. And, 

 by drawing upon a map isobars or lines of equal 

 atmospheric pressure (wo means equal and bar 

 means pressure), the probable course of winds 

 and storms can be learned. More about this 



