Is a calorimeter for a cow called a "coworimeter"? Probably not

"CALOIMETER: Designed and first operated in 1902 by pioneer animal nutritionist Henry Armsby, the calorimeter was housed in this specially constructed building and monitored an animal's metabolism to determine the net energy value of food - the portion of food energy that an animal used to produce milk or meat. It attracted worldwide scientific interest and helped to develop feeds of higher nutritional value."

If you've taken chemistry classes in high school or college, you may already be familiar with the basic concept of the calorimeter, a device used to measure heat in a reaction. You may have even made one yourself in class using a paper cup. 

The calorimeter here is not the paper cup kind, unless you happen to have been using paper cups big enough to hold an entire cow.

Back in the 1800s, while agriculture was still a direct part of most people's lives, it had not been scientifically perfected. Nobody really knew how animals' bodies worked, so when it came to feeding livestock most farmers just fed whatever they happened to have for them and hope for the best. Henry Armsby sought to use the power of science to analyze animals' nutrition and figure out how best to feed them so that they would be as healthy as possible, and therefore give as much high-quality meat as possible. This is why he came to Penn State and built a giant calorimeter large enough to hold a cow, so that the cow could be put inside and the heat it gave off through metabolism measured, since, after all, any energy going into producing heat was energy not being used to grow.

(compliments of Penn State University)

That's the basic principle behind the Armsby calorimeter, and when written that way the process sounds sort of ridiculous. Ultimately, Armsby's colleagues and successors concluded that judging the nutritive value of different animal feeds as originally intended was not very useful because of a large number of confounding factors. However, the calorimeter was still very useful in making discoveries about the metabolism of animals and how they derived energy from food. And not only was it a great scientific advance, it also helped to draw new students and experts in agricultural science, revitalizing Penn State's dying AgSci department. The surprise success of the calorimeter was such that it was modified multiple times over the following decades in order to perform experiments on more types of animals, including humans in the 1950s. The calorimeter still exists at Penn State today, and while it is not used for actual experiments so much any more, it is preserved for its educational and historic value.

And where would you go to see this calorimeter? Why, to the Calorimeter Museum, of course!

This is a real sign on a real building just off of Curtin Road, near the Forum building. I have not had the opportunity to go inside and check it out, but it is definitely possible for you to pay a visit and find out more about the science behind the Armsby calorimeter than I could ever tell you.

Alternatively, maybe you really don't care much about this device. (I know that I would rather avoid any chemistry-related subject if at all reasonable.) However, even if you don't want to have anything to do with the calorimeter, the calorimeter probably has plenty to do with you. For this calorimeter was one early and influential attempt at using scientific principles to experiment on living organisms to improve their resource yields. This is important because the use of science to improve agriculture is still going on today, and is in fact the cause of one of the world's current great controversies: the use of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Today, could such a use of the calorimeter be seen as cruel or dangerous? Even if not, the impact of experiments such as the Armsby calorimeter was a step towards the use of science that is so hotly debated now.