Georgian [up to c1830]

Until the last quarter of the 18^th Century, virtually all English Barometers were of the Stick variety

In their construction and design, Barometers closely reflected the prevailing furniture style.  Walnut gave way to mahogany around 1740 as the preferred material, and the styles, usually individualistic, became more classically simple, architectural pediments appearing from c1770. Not many Barometers from the pre- 1770s remain.

From around 1780, there was an increasing harmonisation into a small number of barometer styles – especially in pediments, engraving style and cistern covers. Most were produced, in small batches, by a group of London based ‘Optical and Mathematical’ instrument makers.

 The latter Georgian period saw an explosion of Barometer manufacture by Italian immigrants in workshops in Holborn, London.    The design of their Stick Barometers was, from the start, almost exclusively restricted to one familiar format, increasingly popular with the burgeoning middle-class.

Victorian  [c1840 - 1900]

Stick Barometer styles changed in a number of ways as the 19^th Century progressed -

Register plates were made of ivory [later bone] or porcelain instead of silvered brass.
Lettering style was more ornate.
Architectural pediments gave way to the ‘ogee’.
Rosewood and walnut became fashionable from around 1860, and oak from around  1880.

The final quarter of the Century also saw the introduction of the popular Admiral Fitzroy Barometer, a style which is still reproduced today.

WHEEL BAROMETERS

Georgian [c1780 - 1830]

The popularity of the mercury Wheel – or colloquially ‘banjo’ – Barometer is due entirely to the activities of Italian immigrants, who settled in London from around 1780 producing instruments  with a variety of  decorative marquetry inlays and elaborately engraved dials.

Increased demand at the beginning of the 19^th Century culminated in the ubiquitous ‘Sheraton style’ Wheel Barometer with simpler, stereotyped decoration and usually bearing the provincial address of the retailer, the barometer having been made in London.        

Victorian  [c1840 - 1900]

Throughout the 19^th Century, increasing demand for Barometers generated a growing use of newly developed mass-production techniques. Machine made parts, thinner veneers and standardised designs became the norm by mid-Century.

Mahogany continued to be the favoured wood until around 1860 when rosewood and walnut became fashionable. From the 1880s oak  cases were most in demand in parallel with the 'Arts and Crafts' movement's encouragement of indigenous woods. Larger, 10 and 12 inch dials went into the more spacious hallways of the growing middle classes.

The most significant technical development of the period was the introduction of the Aneroid Barometer, in the 1850s, which had all but eliminated its mercury competitor by the close of the Century.

The very earliest – 17^th Century – Barometers were in fact primitive altimeters used to determine the height of mountains. Technical developments in the early 18th and 19th Century enabled more sophisticated instruments to be employed in experiments in the upper Atmosphere [‘Balloonists Barometers’]    Similar Barometers were used by surveyors on every continent [‘Mountain Barometers’]

Fortin Barometers – with visible reservoirs - were  the essential Laboratory adjunct for a hundred years from the 1860s. 

A large variety of Barometer types were devised to give accurate weather forecasting data.  In particular Marine Barometers [including Sympiesometers] were increasingly employed from the early 19^th Century; and other types were introduced for specific locations, e.g. Farmers’ Barometers  and ‘Fishery or Sea Coast’ Barometers

First introduced at the London Great Exhibition in 1851, Aneroid Barometers, [literally meaning ‘without liquid’], quickly became an attractive alternative to the traditional Mercury Barometer.

Being unconstrained as to size or shape they were produced in a wide variety of forms, from the pocket-sized traveller’s Barometer to large domestic pieces.

By the end of the 19^th Century their price  and inherent portability had destroyed the market for the Mercury Barometer. Even in areas requiring precise measurements, such as the marine environment, they established a strong presence before the end of the Victorian era.

The "Recording Barometer" or Barograph was first commercially produced, albeit in very small numbers,  in the 1870s, harnessing the movement of mercury in a standard Torricellian column of mercury.

It was not until the 1880s that the Aneroid mechanism became powerful enough to enable the data to be recorded, initially, in the main, in the form of Weather Stations in public buildings.

The familiar Barograph, with glazed hood, was introduced in the 1890s, and has been produced in essentially the same form  up to the present day. However, the earliest models are generally of superior quality.