Anemometer

An anemometer is a device that measures wind speed and, in some designs, wind direction, and is a standard instrument at weather stations. The earliest known description of an anemometer was given by the Italian architect and author Leon Battista Alberti in 1450. The instrument's basic design changed little for centuries, until the Irish astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson improved it in 1846 with a four-cup design driving a mechanical counting wheel, and the Canadian meteorologist John Patterson refined it further with a three-cup version in 1926.