UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Chances are you have walked by the Respiration-Calorimeter Building on Penn State's University Park campus and not noticed it. If you did, you may have thought this modest one-and-a-half-story brick structure, tucked between Armsby and Patterson Buildings, was a simple utility or storage building.
Inside, however, is one of the University's historic treasures -- the Penn State Armsby Calorimeter.
The respiration calorimeter was proposed in 1898 by animal nutrition Professor Henry P. Armsby, who used it to perform experimental research on animal metabolism, a growing field of study at Penn State at the turn of the 20th century.
A calorimeter is an instrument used to measure the amount of heat that is absorbed or released during physical and chemical processes. This allowed Armsby to measure how much energy an animal was able to derive from a certain food source.
Here's how it worked, and how it is still used as a teaching tool for students even today: