Eugène Bourdon is the almost unknown inventor of one of the instruments most known by engineers around the World. From its introduction around the middle of XIX century, the Bourdon manometer or tube has been the most employed instrument for measuring pressure at laboratory and industrial scales. Its appearance in the European market, following by that in America, became a starting point for the gradual but firm replacement of the by then very usual mercury manometer through an element that worked based on a different physical principle. Its invention, oblivious to all the by then usual priority polemics around scientific and technological events, subsequently allowed developments in instrumentation and process-control related subjects.
Eugène Bourdon; manometer; history; pressure; instrumentation; control; barometer; mercury manometer
