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Some objects outlive their makers quietly and without pretension. The aneroid barometer is one of them. It hangs in a hallway for decades, asks for no batteries and no firmware updates, and once a day, when its owner taps the glass out of habit, the needle twitches and says something about the weather to come. Inside sits a thin-walled metal capsule evacuated to a near-vacuum, together with a lever train that translates the microscopic deformation of its walls under atmospheric pressure into a legible movement of the hand. A mechanism conceived in the middle of the nineteenth century and perfected in the first half of the twentieth.
One of the firms that did the perfecting was BARIGO.
The story begins neither in a laboratory nor in a mechanic's workshop, but on the road. In the first decades of the twentieth century a travelling salesman for a large clock factory criss-crossed Württemberg and the Black Forest — a man with a good memory for faces, prices and the moods of retailers. His name was Richard Goes. Out of that road, out of an intimate knowledge of distribution networks and out of the Black Forest's habit of precision mechanics, grew an enterprise whose name was an acronym of his own: BArometerfabrik RIchard GOes.
The firm lived for almost a century. It survived the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the war, the occupation zones, the economic miracle, the flood of cheap Asian electronics and the digital revolution. It supplied barometers to German living rooms, to Mediterranean yachts, to Australian ship chandlers and to parachutists. Its instruments won red dot awards, and its carved Black Forest barometers with cuckoos now sit on collectors' shelves from Rotterdam to San Francisco.
And it ended quietly: at the close of 2024 the brand, the customers and part of the production went to a Saxon manufactory in the Ore Mountains, and six months later what remained in Dauchingen amounted to an insolvency estate of eighty-three thousand euros and an entry recording its liquidation.
What follows is a reconstruction of that history, as far as surviving catalogues, commercial registers, century-old trade press and insolvency notices allow it to be assembled.
Richard Goes was born on 3 January 1878 in Adozhausen near Mergentheim, in Württemberg. His father was Georg Goes, a native of Metzingen (1846–1919); his mother was Eugenie, née Riecke. The family was large: among Richard's siblings were Eberhardt, Reinhold, Thusnelde, Elisabeth, Johanna, Martin and Walther. By profession he became a Kaufmann — a merchant, not a mechanic — and that circumstance shaped the character of the entire future enterprise. From the outset BARIGO was a firm in which commercial instinct ran ahead of engineering enthusiasm rather than behind it: hence its export reach, its catalogues in four languages, and its knack for selling one and the same movement in a hundred different cases.
His career led him into the clock industry, the dominant force in the economic life of the Black Forest at the time. By the turn of the century Schwenningen am Neckar had become one of the largest centres of German clock manufacture: Kienzle, Mauthe, Bürk and Isgus worked there, along with dozens of medium and small factories, and around them a dense web of suppliers, grinders, electroplaters and cabinetmakers. The trade press of the period records that Goes spent many years as a travelling representative for Schlenker & Kienzle, one of Germany's largest clock manufacturers, whose origins reached back to 1822. Those years on the road gave him something that cannot be bought: knowledge of the entire trade from the inside, from price lists to the temperaments of buyers.
In 1919 he took his first independent step. Two trade papers reported it that September. Die Uhrmacher-Woche (Leipziger Uhrmacher-Zeitung), No. 36, 1919, wrote that the wholesale clock business of the late Rudolf Seifert in Villingen had been purchased by Richard Goes and transferred to him with all assets and liabilities on 15 August; the firm now traded as Richard Goes vorm. Rudolf Seifert, Uhren En-gros und Export, and Herr Goes, as a long-serving traveller for Schlenker & Kienzle, was thoroughly familiar with the trade. Deutsche Uhrmacher-Zeitung, 1919, No. 37, of 11 September 1919, carried the same news in its "Kleine Nachrichten" column, among items on powers of attorney granted at the Berlin wholesaler Arthur Lesser, the registration of Oscar Weiß's clock export agency in Nuremberg, a 20 % dividend at the Deutsche Gold- und Silber-Scheideanstalt in Frankfurt, and the reopening of an old gold and silver mine near Hohenstein-Ernstthal.
The year, it is worth noting, was not an easy one to choose. Germany had just lost the war and was entering the era that would end in the hyperinflation of 1923.
Exactly when Goes moved from selling clocks to manufacturing barometers cannot be stated with certainty — and this is the first point at which the sources diverge.
A cautious reconstruction runs as follows: Goes's commercial entry into the trade dates from 1919; barometer manufacture proper he established around 1925–1926 in Esslingen; the one-year discrepancy probably reflects the difference between the actual start of work and the formal constitution of the firm.
The new venture was named in a manner thoroughly typical of the Black Forest: Goes built an acronym out of his own name. BARIGO = BArometerfabrik RIchard GOes. The derivation is confirmed both by corporate material and by trade dictionaries of abbreviations used by German clock and instrument firms, where BARIGO stands alongside URGOS, BADUF, JUBA and EMES. The word became the basis of the logo — spare, with its characteristic syllabic division — which in one form or another survived to the brand's final days.
In the 1930s several trademark registrations are associated with the Goes name. The archives record, in particular, the mark "Neuland" — for alarm clocks, class 14, registered on 24 April 1934 to Richard Goes / Barigo-Barometerfabrik in Schwenningen; the BARIGO mark itself was presumably registered around the same time, in the early 1930s. The alarm-clock entry is instructive: it shows that Goes had not abandoned horology but combined it with barometry — an entirely natural pairing in Schwenningen, since both called for the same skills of fine stamping, scales, dials and polished brass.
By the late thirties the firm was growing. A trade notice in Uhrmacher-Woche No. 24 of 1939, under the heading "Geschäftsveränderungen", records that the Richard Goes barometer factory in Esslingen a. N. had moved its operations to the Blumenstraße — new and more spacious premises. A few months later the war began, and the following ten years of the company's history are documented only sparsely.
The decisive turn came in 1949, when the young Federal Republic was only finding its feet. The business was acquired by three entrepreneurs — Mehne, Hayer and Müller — and the headquarters moved definitively to Schwenningen, where the key resource was to be found: a skilled workforce trained in the clock trade.
The new owners acted sensibly and did not break with the past: for a long time the firm continued to trade under a name of succession — "Richard Goes Nachfolger, Inhaber Jakob Mehne & Co." ("Richard Goes, Successor — Proprietor Jakob Mehne & Co."). That is precisely how it appears on the title pages of the catalogues of the late 1950s. Goes himself lived to see this flowering of his brand, but from a distance: he died on 21 November 1956 in Esslingen, in his seventy-ninth year. Little is known of his private life: his first wife was Luise, née Glock, married in Stuttgart on 22 June 1911; his second was Gertrud, née Roth, married in Stuttgart on 21 March 1925. He had a son, Karl.
The Mehne family remained at the head of the enterprise until the very end of its history — for almost eight decades. The later legal structure comprised the limited partnership BARIGO Mehne, Hayer, Müller GmbH & Co. KG and the associated BARIGO Beteiligungs- und Verwaltungs GmbH, the managing general partner (Amtsgericht Freiburg, HRB 708157). The managing directors were the engineer Hans Hermann Mehne (Dipl.-Ing.) and the economist Volker Mehne (Dipl.-oec.). Separately there existed BARIGO Barometerfabrik GmbH (HRB 600793, Amtsgericht Freiburg; share capital DEM 400,000) — the very entity that was to be the last one standing.
The sequence of addresses in Schwenningen ran as follows: in 1953 BARIGO moved into new premises at Turmstraße 26, and in 1955 to Eichendorffstraße 28. That address would remain the company's own for decades, appearing on catalogue title pages, on letterheads, and beside the telegraphic address "barigo schwenningenneckar".
The engineering core of BARIGO was and remained the aneroid — that is, liquid-free — barometer. The catalogues of the late 1950s (Katalog Nr. 57 of 1957, Katalog Nr. 59 of 1959 and its supplement) describe the house technology with unhurried thoroughness:
The 1957 catalogue also contained something strictly practical: a table for setting the "Veränderlich" (Change) mark according to local altitude above sea level, from zero (762 mm) to 2,460 metres (560 mm). An aneroid must be calibrated for its particular altitude, and the instructions advised entrusting the operation to an experienced optician, who would manage it in a few seconds.
The 1957 range ran to hundreds of items — models numbered from 85 to 3042, including barograph No. 2550 with a seven-day drum. The accompanying "BRUTTO-PREISLISTE No. 12 (Optikerverkaufspreise)" of 1 August 1957 gave retail prices for opticians in Deutschmarks: the modest wall barometer No. 90 cost DM 14.90, while the desk combination No. 351 with an eight-day clock came to DM 90.10. The supplement to catalogue No. 59 (pages 55–82) added new models in cases of walnut, mahogany, cherry, oak, teak, brass and imitations — and, importantly for dating, carried on its title page the four-digit postal code "722 Schwenningen am Neckar", which places it after 1962.
The design deserves separate discussion. BARIGO passed through the same evolution as the whole of German material culture in the twentieth century, only at an accelerated pace and with unusual breadth. On one side of the catalogue stood the Black Forest Heimatstil: hand-carved barometers with cottages, fir trees, chapels, cuckoos and hunting scenes complete with stag heads, pheasants and hares, weighing up to 1,150 grams. On the other stood the mid-century proper: the boomerang, the eye, the propeller, the guitar, the ship's wheel, the anchor, a globe on a chromed yoke, a barometer shaped like a pocket watch with convex glass. A single factory supplied at once the bourgeois parlour with its carved oak and the modernist flat with its teak and brass — and both were convinced their choice was the only right one. The firm later traced its own formal tradition back to the Bauhaus and won recognised awards: the red dot design award (in 2004 among others) and the outdoor industry award (2011).
A separate and commercially important branch of the business was marine instrumentation — Schiffsbarometer and Schiffsuhren: brass barometers, thermometers, hygrometers, clinometers and clocks, including some with ship's-bell striking (Glasenschlag) and with eight-day or quartz movements.
The 1979/80 catalogue organised this range into "nautical" series with names that sound like yacht clubs: PILOT, CORSAR, STAR, NEPTUN, CAPTAIN, YACHT, ADMIRAL, CLIPPER, NAUTILUS, COLUMBUS, VIP, ACE, MARINER. The logic is simple and rather elegant: the series was defined by the diameter of the dial and case, and within each series came a barometer, thermometer, hygrometer, thermo-hygrometer, clinometer and clock — a complete outfit for the wheelhouse.
The surviving copy of this catalogue bears the label of the Australian distributor RAUTEC Pty. Ltd. (P.O. Box 25, Mt. Waverley, Victoria 3149; office at 79 Headingley Road, telephone 232 5296) and is accompanied by a wholesale price list, "WHOLESALE ONLY effective 1.1.1981", in Australian dollars — with the note that prices are ex store Melbourne and subject to sales tax of 27.5 % on clocks and 15 % on everything else. A small detail, but one that shows how far the instruments from Schwenningen travelled.
The series, with dial and case dimensions:
Outside the series came individual instruments: clinometers 910 and 911, thermometers 855 and 909. Many series were also offered "with spokes" (Mit Speichen lieferbar) — a decorative ship's-wheel ring from 115 to 210 mm in diameter, turning a sober instrument into a souvenir.
This marine line proved the most durable part of the legacy: the present-day BARIGO series — TEMPO, STEEL, REGATTA, VIKING, SKY, PENTABLE — in brass and steel cases are still sold by chandlers today.
Two events of differing magnitude occurred in 1972. The municipal one: Villingen and Schwenningen merged into a single Villingen-Schwenningen — from which point the older spelling "Schwenningen am Neckar" on an instrument becomes a dating clue. And the corporate one: a large south wing was added to the main building on Eichendorffstraße.
Capacity remained short, and in 1980 BARIGO built a new production block in the industrial estate of neighbouring Dauchingen — roughly a thousand square metres of usable floor space. In 1993 an extension of a further 630 m² or so was added. The brand's registered address eventually moved there too: Daimlerstraße 16, 78083 Dauchingen.
The eighties and nineties passed under the sign of cautious electronification. According to the company's own account, two "firsts" on the German market belong to it: the first electronic thermometer (1986) and the first electronic altimeter (1991). These claims come chiefly from the firm itself and are not corroborated by an independent trade source — they are best read as the corporate version rather than as strictly verified fact. But the direction they indicate is correct: BARIGO found its niche where electronics offered a genuine advantage, in portable instruments for mountaineers, parachutists and pilots.
At the same time the firm pointedly refused to abandon mechanics. Classic aneroid barometers and hair hygrometers continued to be assembled by hand, with a high proportion of in-house component manufacture — dials, cases, barometric movements. In an age when everyone around was moving to plastic and liquid crystal, this was a deliberate act of positioning.
In 1996 management passed to a new generation of the owning family, with Volker Mehne at its head. In 1998 a French subsidiary of its own was opened. By the 2000s the range was divided into four directions: Marine (nautical instruments), Outdoor (outdoor watches and measuring devices, including the PENTA line with weather forecast and compass), Para (altimeters for skydiving and flying) and Living (domestic weather stations, barometers, thermometers, hygrometers and sauna instruments).
A curious side plot: the BARIGO name also appears in an entirely different context, as a brand of Ergomo bicycle power meters and Barochron devices. These trademarks were registered by BARIGO Barometerfabrik GmbH in the 2000s and reflect attempts at diversification into sports electronics — a direction which, judging by the absence of traces, never came to much.
By the 2010s BARIGO Barometerfabrik GmbH remained a small family manufactory in Dauchingen; by its own account, some fifteen people were employed there towards the end.
In 2024 the manufacture of BARIGO instruments passed to the Saxon manufactory Feingerätebau K. Fischer GmbH of Drebach in the Ore Mountains.
The buyer deserves an introduction, because its biography mirrors BARIGO's. The firm was founded in October 1945 by the aeronautical engineer Kurt Fischer, in the Ore Mountain community of Drebach, in the Soviet occupation zone. The first barometers appeared as early as 1946; hygrometers followed from 1950. In 1963 intensive research by Bernd Fischer in the field of hygrometry established the reputation of FISCHER hygrometers, which holds to this day, and in 1965 a six-element aneroid measuring movement was patented. In 1972 the enterprise was forcibly nationalised as VEB Feingerätebau Drebach — the same year in which Kurt Fischer died. In 1990 the firm was reprivatised and returned to the family. Registration details: Amtsgericht Chemnitz, HRB 1252; managing director Christoph Juppe, authorised officer and sales director Peter Fischer.
The transaction was reported by Freie Presse on 28 November 2024, in an article by Mike Baldauf under the telling headline "A new premium brand in the Ore Mountains". The Drebach enterprise took over customers, suppliers and part of the production previously located in the Black Forest; managing director Juppe expected an additional million euros of turnover — his forecast, not a realised figure. The photograph accompanying the article showed Peter Fischer with a Fischer precision barometer and a BARIGO house weather station which, it was said, would in future also be manufactured in Drebach.
In character this was a transfer of assets — customer base, suppliers, brand rights, part of the production and the know-how — rather than a purchase of shares in the GmbH. The BARIGO legal entity itself continued to exist separately. Not for long.
On 28 May 2025 at 12:00 the Amtsgericht Villingen-Schwenningen, in case no. 1 IN 64/25, appointed a provisional administrator — the lawyer Paul Johann Frank (Wilhelm-Binder-Straße 19, 78048 Villingen-Schwenningen) — and imposed protective measures under §§ 21, 22 InsO. The debtor was represented by its managing director Volker Mehne; the registration number was HRB 600793, Amtsgericht Freiburg.
On 1 July 2025 the Schwarzwälder Bote ran an article whose headline left no room for hope: "Insolvency petition filed: all employees are being given notice — Dauchingen firm is on the floor." The text opened by calling it the end of a traditional enterprise and recalled that BARIGO had been founded in Schwenningen in 1926.
According to Insolvenz-Radar, the estate under administration amounted to only €83,417.10 (the provisional administrator's application is dated 7 November 2025) — a figure that speaks eloquently of what remained of a nearly century-old firm. On 1 December 2025 the liquidation entry followed.
No available source describes the 2024 transaction outright as a forced sale. But the chronology — the transfer of brand, customers, suppliers and part of the production at the end of 2024, followed by the insolvency and liquidation of the remaining entity in 2025 — strongly suggests that the move to Fischer was a rescue of the brand and of the productive core against a deteriorating background.
A successful rescue, it must be said. From that point the barigo.de website and its imprint name Feingerätebau K. Fischer GmbH (Venusberger Straße 24, 09430 Drebach) as the operator. The Drebach factory manufactures instruments under both marks. BARIGO barometers are still assembled by hand — only four hundred kilometres further north-east, in another mountain region, at a company that is itself a couple of decades older than its new brand and that once lost its own name and won it back.
BARIGO instruments can be dated from a combination of features — a method useful to anyone holding an unidentified barometer with darkened brass.
1. The company name on the plaque or dial. "Richard Goes Nachf., Inh. Jakob Mehne & Co." — roughly from 1949 into the 1960s (this is the wording on the 1957 and 1959 catalogues). "BARIGO Barometerfabrik GmbH" — the later period.
2. The country-of-origin marking — the key dating feature for German products. "Made in Western Germany", "Made in W. Germany", "West Germany" — the Federal Republic, roughly 1949 to the late 1980s or early 1990s. "Made in Germany" — either the pre-war period or after reunification in 1990. The inscriptions "Kompensiert" (temperature-compensated) and "Luftdruck in Millimeter" are typical of the middle period.
3. The postal code in the address. Four-digit West German postal codes were in use from 1962 to 1993, so the address "722 Schwenningen am Neckar" dates an item or catalogue to 1962–1993. A five-digit "78xxx Villingen-Schwenningen" means after the 1993 reform. The city name "Schwenningen am Neckar" without Villingen shifts the dating to before the 1972 merger.
4. Model numbers. BARIGO used a continuous numerical system. In the 1950s catalogues these ran from two- and three-digit numbers (85, 90, 116, the 200s and 300s series) to four-digit ones (barograph 2550, the 3000s desk series). In the 1979/80 marine catalogues the numbers cluster by series: 700s for PILOT and CORSAR, 1100s for STAR, 1300s for NEPTUN, 1400s for ADMIRAL, 1500s–1600s for CLIPPER, NAUTILUS and COLUMBUS, 2100s for CAPTAIN, 9000s for MARINER. Modern article numbers carry letter suffixes for material and finish: 683cr for chrome, 683ms for brass, 611msfs for brass with radio-silence sectors.
5. Style and materials. Black Forest carving indicates the early period. Space-age forms, "pocket-watch" brass, teak and Danish modern belong to the 1960s–1980s. The austere steel and brass geometry of the TEMPO and STEEL lines is contemporary.
When all the features agree, a dating accurate to within a decade is reliable. For marine instruments the series list is the guide: dial size alone almost unambiguously identifies the series — 70 mm means PILOT, 85 mm STAR, 90 mm CAPTAIN, 100 mm YACHT, 125 mm CLIPPER, 150 mm COLUMBUS, 200 mm MARINER.
The arc of BARIGO's hundred years is, in miniature, the arc of German precision manufacturing itself. A merchant with a good eye for markets founds a workshop between the wars; a second family takes it over in the ruins of 1949 and carries it through the economic miracle; the range swells to hundreds of models and spreads from Black Forest parlours to Australian chandleries; electronics arrive and are absorbed rather than resisted; and finally the scale that once made the firm viable — fifteen people making mechanical instruments by hand — becomes the thing that makes it fragile.
What is striking is how little the core changed. The evacuated capsule, the lever train and the delicate chain that Goes was selling in the 1920s are recognisably the same mechanism that left Dauchingen in the 2010s. The cases changed constantly — carved stags gave way to boomerangs, boomerangs to brushed steel — but the physics did not, and neither did the requirement that someone sit at a bench and adjust each movement by hand. That is precisely why the brand could be moved: what Fischer acquired in 2024 was not a factory floor so much as a set of designs, a customer list and a body of tacit knowledge that a comparable workshop could absorb.
And so the ending is less melancholy than the insolvency file suggests. The legal entity in Dauchingen is gone, its estate valued at less than the price of a used car. But the instruments are still made, still by hand, in a place with a history uncannily parallel to BARIGO's own — a firm founded in the ruins of 1945, nationalised in 1972, restored to its family in 1990. Two German barometer makers from opposite sides of a vanished border now share one workbench. Richard Goes, a man who understood better than most how goods find their way to the people who want them, would probably have approved of the arrangement.
Primary sources — company catalogues
Contemporary trade press (1919–1939)
Genealogical source
Scholarly and specialist publications
Press
Registers, legal and business databases
Company websites
Trade, collecting and catalogues
Reference context
| Date | Event |
|---|
| 3 January 1878 | Birth of Richard Goes at Adozhausen near Mergentheim, Württemberg |
| 15 August 1919 | Goes takes over the wholesale clock business of the late Rudolf Seifert in Villingen |
| c. 1925–1926 | Foundation of barometer manufacture in Esslingen; emergence of the BARIGO brand (sources differ: 1925 per DMG, 1926 per the company and Schwarzwälder Bote) |
| early 1930s | Trademark registrations associated with Goes and the BARIGO mark |
| 24 April 1934 | Registration of the mark "Neuland" (alarm clocks) to Richard Goes / Barigo-Barometerfabrik, Schwenningen |
| 1939 | The factory moves its operations to the Blumenstraße, Esslingen |
| October 1945 | Foundation of Feingerätebau K. Fischer in Drebach — BARIGO's future acquirer |
| 1949 | Mehne, Hayer and Müller acquire the business; consolidation in Schwenningen; the name "Richard Goes Nachfolger, Inh. Jakob Mehne & Co." |
| 1953 | Move to Turmstraße 26, Schwenningen |
| 1955 |
| Move to Eichendorffstraße 28 |
| 21 November 1956 | Death of Richard Goes in Esslingen |
| 1957 | Katalog Nr. 57 and Brutto-Preisliste No. 12 (1 August) |
| 1959 | Katalog Nr. 59 |
| 1962–1993 | Period of four-digit West German postal codes ("722 Schwenningen am Neckar") |
| 1972 | Merger of Villingen and Schwenningen; south wing added |
| 1979/80 | Marine instrument catalogue (series PILOT to MARINER); RAUTEC as Australian distributor |
| 1980 | New production building in Dauchingen (~1,000 m²) |
| 1 January 1981 | RAUTEC wholesale price list for the Australian market |
| 1986 | First electronic thermometer on the German market, per the company's account |
| 1991 | First electronic altimeter |
| 1993 | Expansion of the Dauchingen premises (~630 m²) |
| 1996 | Management passes to a new generation of the Mehne family |
| 1998 | Opening of a French subsidiary |
| 2004 / 2011 | red dot design award / outdoor industry award |
| 28 November 2024 | Report of the transfer of customers, suppliers, part of the production and the BARIGO brand to Feingerätebau K. Fischer GmbH |
| 28 May 2025, 12:00 | Insolvency proceedings opened against BARIGO Barometerfabrik GmbH (Amtsgericht Villingen-Schwenningen, 1 IN 64/25) |
| 1 July 2025 | Schwarzwälder Bote reports the dismissal of all employees |
| 7 November 2025 | Provisional administrator's application; estate of €83,417.10 |
| 1 December 2025 | Liquidation entry for BARIGO Barometerfabrik GmbH |
Desk Barometer With Glass Dome
