Saturday, October 11, 2008

Antique(?) Barometer


Antique? Barometer

This barometer used to hang in my parents' house when I was growing up. Then my brother claimed it. (The glass was broken when he moved in with my dad... he didn't package it 100% securely, and dad apparently treated the box roughly... not really the fault of either, but the fault of both.) I got it from my brother when I was wondering if my joint pain was pressure related. (I never did make a properly documented study.)

I asked mom (without it there for discussion), and she thought it might have been a wedding present (and therefore not antique).

Dad thinks it might be an antique... he said it wasn't a wedding present, and might have come to the family when my great-grandmother (on my mom's side) moved into a nursing home. Mom... does that sound right?

At any rate, I think it looks cool, and I like how I used a copper-coloured ribbon to hang it from the side of my hand-me-down furniture. (The ribbon goes up over the top, and I screwed a hook into the hidden part of the particle-board side.)

2 comments:

Nicoya said...

I packed the box perfectly well. The barometer was sitting face up on top of a stack of magazines with nothing else on top of or beside it. It broke because father rather forcefully and deliberately threw the box to the ground because he was trying to be a twit.

It would have had to be packed in a rather unreasonable amount of padded packing material to be able to survive that sort of deliberate mishandling of the box. It still would have broken inside a few layers of bubble-wrap.

I don't think it's an antique. It is old, but it's fairly poorly made and I've seen a number of barometers exactly like it here and there so it's definitely not rare.

noricum said...

I stand (partially) corrected. I couldn't remember if dad had put it down rough, or if he had set something on top of it (in which case, better packaging would have helped). At any rate, he only knew about the magazines inside, not the barometer.

"Antique" only means old, not rare, well made, or valuable. Googling, I found some photos of similar ones, called aneroid barometers, and are victorian, or around the early 1900s. That would qualify as antique.