Does anyone have any idea what this is?

[smartcooky]

A customer brought this in today to see if I could tell him what it is. I'm stumped!







There are higher resolution images here if needed

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/ApolloHoax/2014-10-22%2015.03.26.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/ApolloHoax/2014-10-22%2015.04.56.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/98915197/ApolloHoax/2014-10-22%2015.03.51.jpg

1. When you look through the eyepiece you see a red glow with a black reticle, which is graduated from 0 at the top to 50 at the bottom with unnumbered minor steps of 1, intermediate unnumbered steps of 5 and major numbered steps of 10. There are no other markings

2. The 45° cover is spring loaded and flips back. It has a smooth black disk on the inside.

3. You can see the red glow and reticle regardless of whether the cover is flipped back or not.

4. The instrument does not appear to be "part" of something. It comes in its own brown leather case.

5. The writing on the side says "C. P. Goetz Wien 10272"

I tried examining a piece of film negative close up because I thought it might be some kind of focus tester for film, but I could not see the negative surface at all.

Any clues?

[Allan F]

Looks like a device to measure the quality of the coolant fluid in a car's radiator. You smear a sample of it on the angled surface, and look through the diopter. The result is the freezing point of the fluid.

[Sus_pilot]

OK, a couple of questions:

When you look through it with the cover open, do you see straight ahead, or is there  a prism?

Does the diopter focus what you see or just the target reticle and dot?

Is what you see when the cover open magnified or shrunk?

Do you see anything through it when you aim off to infinity?

I keep coming back to it's being part of a reflex viewfinder,as you might find on a Panavision camera from the fifties, but that's just based on pictures I've seen and the fact that Goerz apparently partnered with American Optical in the early '50's.  I could be adding 2+2 and getting purple.

My other guess is that it's part of military range finder of some sort.

You might want to send an email to Martin Hart, Curator of American Wide Screen Museum.  He's been very helpful with my lack of knowledge regarding cine cameras.   If he doesn't recognize it, given that C. P. Goerz was a prominent lens manufacturer, he might know someone who will.

  [email protected]

BTW, that website is the Clavius of movie tech - you can spend days wandering the virtual halls.

[smartcooky]

OK, a couple of questions:

When you look through it with the cover open, do you see straight ahead, or is there  a prism?

You see nothing but a red glow no matter where you point it, and regardless of whether the flap is open or not

Does the diopter focus what you see or just the target reticle and dot?

The diopter only focuses the reticle

Is what you see when the cover open magnified or shrunk?

The only thing you see is the red glow and the reticle. Even waving your hand in front of it does not change what you see

Do you see anything through it when you aim off to infinity?

Same as above.

I keep coming back to it's being part of a reflex viewfinder,as you might find on a Panavision camera from the fifties, but that's just based on pictures I've seen and the fact that Goerz apparently partnered with American Optical in the early '50's.  I could be adding 2+2 and getting purple.

My other guess is that it's part of military range finder of some sort.

You might want to send an email to Martin Hart, Curator of American Wide Screen Museum.  He's been very helpful with my lack of knowledge regarding cine cameras.   If he doesn't recognize it, given that C. P. Goerz was a prominent lens manufacturer, he might know someone who will.

  [email protected]

BTW, that website is the Clavius of movie tech - you can spend days wandering the virtual halls.

Thanks, I'll have a look

I posted the same request at ISF (formerly JREF)

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=10287659#post10287659

The consensus appears to be that it is come sort of liquid refractometer (and one wag think it is "my father's lightsabre")

This would appear to confirm the refractometer suggestions

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Battery-electrolyte-hydrometer-optical-hydrometer-battery-electric-liquid-densitometer/1893999029.html

[ChrLz]

While I don't recognise that one or it's exact functionality, it immediately struck me as very similar to the optical salinity testers we used when I was at a marine research centre, like this:

so yep, I'd bet my boots that the functionality is related to that sort of thing...

Effectively it is designed solely to measure the refractive index of some type of fluid, from whence it deduces some property which is read off that graduated scale - in my case it was salinity, but it could be used for other '..ities'

[Sus_pilot]

I've got to agree that it's some sort of refractometer.

What's really wildly frustrating about this is the way Google searches - I keep wanting to yell at the screen "Did I ask about Carl Zeiss!?"

[Glom]

Looks like one of those tools for measuring water salinity.

[Dalhousie]

Yep, me too

[darren r]

Oh, come on guys. It's obviously a lightsaber.

[smartcooky]

Oh, come on guys. It's obviously a lightsaber.

It cant be, because when the man handed it to me, he did not say "Your father would have wanted you to have this"

[Noldi400]

My first impression was that it looks an awfully lot like a handheld version of the instrument we used to use in medical lab to measure the SG of urine. All of the suggested uses come back to some sort of refractometer, I guess.