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In 1903 an octagonal tower of wrought iron, crowned with a cupola and a weather vane, stood on the Brunnenplatz in the Swiss town of Biel. A passer-by who paused in front of it for a minute could learn the air temperature, the humidity, the barometric pressure reduced to sea level, the direction and force of the wind, the rainfall of the past twenty-four hours, the duration of yesterday's sunshine — and, glancing at a small rotating disc, could compare last night's sunset with fifteen painted specimens of a sunset in order to decide what to expect from tomorrow. The tower was called "Hortensia Biel", and one and the same name stood on all its instruments: Wilh. Lambrecht, Göttingen.
Hundreds of such towers once stood across Europe — on spa promenades, beside railway stations, in municipal parks, on the squares in front of savings banks. A few dozen survive today, and nearly every survivor is a listed monument. The firm that built them still exists: in the same Göttingen, on the same street, under the same name. It is older than unified Germany, older than the telephone, older than the very idea of a daily weather forecast — and it has outlived all of that, including two world wars, hyperinflation, occupation, and the arrival of electronics, which ought to have destroyed its craft and somehow did not.
The story begins with an apprentice who had grown tired of fragile mercury tubes.
Wilhelm Lambrecht was born in the village of Wolbrechtshausen near Nörten-Hardenberg, into a family far removed from science: his father, Georg Christian Friedrich Lambrecht, served as a coachman and later as a court bailiff; his mother was Marie Friederike Amalie, née Schulenburg. The family was Lutheran and of modest means, and after school the boy was placed in a five-year apprenticeship with a mechanic in Einbeck — by the available accounts, in the workshop of Ferdinand Dannert.
It was there, among the heavy, bulky and provokingly fragile measuring instruments of the day, that the thought took shape which would define the rest of his life: a precise instrument need not be an inconvenient one. The mercury barometer was the standard of accuracy and simultaneously a nightmare to transport; the hygrometer was a temperamental laboratory curiosity. Lambrecht spent his life making scientific accuracy portable, affordable and intelligible to people without an education.
The apprenticeship was followed by the wandering years of a journeyman. They took him first to Paris, then to Berlin — to the workshops of Siemens & Halske, at that time still a young firm but already exemplary in its culture of precision mechanics. Returning home, in July 1859 he opened his own precision-mechanical workshop in Einbeck. The firm regards that date as its beginning and prints it on its logo to this day.
In 1864 the business moved to Göttingen. The choice was not accidental: the Georgia Augusta university sustained an entire orbit of workshops living on professors' commissions. Lambrecht entered that circle quickly and formed connections with the chemist Friedrich Wöhler, with a physicist of the Weber family, and — decisively, as it turned out — with the astronomer Wilhelm Klinkerfues, director of the university observatory.
The sources disagree about the founder's date of birth, and the disagreement is a persistent one: the biographical dictionary Neue Deutsche Biographie gives 3 August 1834, while the handbook of Göttingen street names published by the municipal archive gives 25 July 1833 and states outright that the dictionary's date is mistaken. The date of death raises no doubt: 17 June 1904, Göttingen.
The acquaintance with Klinkerfues began with a battery. In 1867 Lambrecht brought back from the Paris World Exhibition the first chromic-acid battery, and the astronomer was at that moment looking for a reliable current source for the electric gas igniter he had invented. Several years went into attempts to bring that invention to a marketable state — the work was carried out in Hanover and Vienna and met with little success.
By the time Lambrecht returned to Göttingen in the mid-1870s, Klinkerfues had become absorbed in something else: forecasting the weather. He had developed a bifilar hygrometer, an ingenious and scientifically impeccable device which nonetheless performed badly in the hands of a layman. Lambrecht undertook to build it in series — and in the process rebuilt it: he changed the construction, reworked the scale, and made the instrument adjustable. Thus appeared the "patent hygrometer" to which the firm owed its first fame.
The partnership ended in a rupture, and the rupture was a loud one. The astronomer printed a pamphlet, Für meine Freunde! (Göttingen, 1880), accusing his former manufacturer of appropriating another man's invention. Lambrecht answered with a pamphlet bearing an eloquent title — A Halo and Its Worth, or Klinkerfues and His Weather Compass (Göttingen, 1881). The quarrel was not merely one of vanity: behind it lay the question of who owns an instrument — the man who conceived the principle, or the man who made the principle work. Legally the second man won. The patents for a "meteorological apparatus" and a "hygroscope", granted in the United States in 1881 and 1883, remained with Klinkerfues; but the name that buyers around the world associated with the hair hygrometer became Lambrecht's.
The principle on which the firm rested for close to a century and a half is almost indecently simple. A degreased human hair lengthens when moistened and shortens as it dries — by roughly two and a half per cent across the whole range from dry air to saturation. A bundle of such hairs, stretched between two points and linked to an adjustable crank pin, drives a pointer across a scale of relative humidity.
The firm's own descriptions speak of this element with an almost tender concreteness: "a long prepared strand of blonde woman's hair", as the 1902 catalogue has it. Hairs about twenty centimetres long; in later constructions, eight bundles clamped at equal intervals in a phosphor-bronze holder and hanging freely, without the rollers over which they would bend and break. It was precisely this — the absence of rollers and of kinks — by which the firm explained the superiority of its hygrographs over those of competitors.
The instrument required care, and the firm said so honestly. Once a month the hair was to be wetted with distilled or rain water — with a pigeon's feather or a small atomiser of the kind used for inhalations (the atomiser was sold separately, at two and a half lire from the Milanese agent). After an hour the procedure was repeated, and if, after fifteen or twenty minutes in the wetted state, the pointer stood at 95, the instrument was sound; if not, it was adjusted with a small screwdriver. The "95 when fully wetted" position was independent of the humidity of the surrounding air, and this gave the owner a way to check the instrument at home, without a condensation hygrometer or a psychrometer.
Out of this element grew the firm's principal invention — the polymeter.
The polymeter (1877) combined a hair hygrometer and a mercury thermometer of Jena hard glass on a single mount. What was ingenious was not the mechanism but the scale: besides relative humidity and temperature, it carried auxiliary numbers that allowed the user to read off, without calculation, the dew point, the saturation pressure, the actual vapour pressure, the saturation deficit and the absolute humidity in grams per cubic metre. Nine quantities at a glance, with no tables and no pencil. The firm called it "a small meteorological observatory requiring no special knowledge" and sold it under the slogan "Every man his own weather prophet". By 1910 more than sixty thousand polymeters were in use, and the booklet of owners' testimonials — from farmers, gardeners, physicians, teachers and travellers — ran to more than five hundred entries and was sent out free of charge.
The polymeter came with "Dr. Troska's weather rules" — nine points on the behaviour of the dew point, of the kind that read today like folk lore but were at the time perfectly respectable short-range synoptics: a dew point above seventeen degrees means a thunderstorm is likely; below zero, there will be frost at night; rapid oscillations mean wind. The firm's early barometers were supplied with rules written by the Frankfurt geophysicist W. A. Nippoldt (November 1880), who warned candidly that general rules hold for a country, local ones for a district, and that the value of an observation rises the more local it is.
Recognition came early and spectacularly. On 13 September 1878, at the pharmacists' exhibition in Coblenz, the senior schoolmaster Hiecke of Oberlahnstein was granted the honour of explaining the patent hygrometer on display there to the Empress Augusta. She liked the instrument so much that on 28 November an order followed to deliver one like it to the Berlin Palace — by 5 December, the day of the Emperor Wilhelm's ceremonial entry into the capital. The instrument, as Lambrecht himself writes, was executed "originally and artistically", it pleased the highest personages, and on 16 December the maker received a gracious letter of thanks and, as a keepsake, a pin set with diamonds.
Out of this episode was born the object that stands apart in the whole legacy of the firm: the Kaiserin-Augusta-Hygrometer, "for weather forecasting and the control of room air", of Italian wood, carved by an artist's hand, at a price of 300 marks — a sum for which, in 1880, one could have bought twenty ordinary wall hygrometers.
The awards then came in a succession. The title pages of the catalogues announce that the proprietor is a holder of the Order for Art and Science, of the large gold and various other state medals, "awarded the highest prizes at every exhibition attended". The last entry on the pre-war list is the gold medal of the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden of 1911. The interwar publications add a medal of the Austrian Meteorological Society "for outstanding services". And in 1903, on the master's seventieth birthday, the illustrated press printed his portrait — against the background of a weather column.
In 1874 the business moved to Friedländer Weg 65–67, where it stands today. The engraving on the title page of the autumn 1880 catalogue shows no longer a workshop but a factory: a long two-storey building with dormer windows, a smoking chimney, a flag on its mast, a fence, carts at the gate — and a weather column at the corner of the plot, with "SCHÖN WETTER" on its plate, serving as signboard and advertisement at once.
Lambrecht spoke of the interior arrangements without false modesty. Equipping the workshop with "the most excellent original American and other machines" enabled him, he said, to make instruments quickly, cheaply and in the most perfect execution — and to secure inventors a high share of the profit. The Leipziger illustrirte Zeitung in August 1879 praised the firm for exactly this: for the consistent application of the principle of the division of labour, which in France had already made physical instruments both excellent and comparatively cheap, and which in Germany was still a rarity.
Göttingen was in any case a town of precision mechanics: Sartorius, Ruhstrat and Spindler & Hoyer worked nearby. In 1921 these firms together founded a joint sales cooperative — the Verkaufsvereinigung Göttinger Werkstätten, from 1925 the Vereinigung Göttinger Werke.
Success drew imitators, and the firm fought them furiously. The catalogues print a warning: genuine instruments are only those bearing the name Lambrecht and the trademark — the WL monogram in a trefoil shield; "other worthless apparatus imitating the external form is to be rejected, as it is calculated upon deception." And a postscript with the air of a courtroom about it: by judicial decision, any attempt to sell another maker's instrument as a genuine Lambrecht is punished, on a first offence, by a fine of two hundred marks.
By the turn of the twentieth century the firm's catalogue was divided into numbered "lists" — separate price lists by instrument group. Their index, printed on the last page of every issue, gives the best impression of the scale of production:
Behind this dry table stands a production of remarkable breadth.
The hygrometric core. The polymeter was made in brass with a card scale (20 marks in 1910) and in phosphor bronze with an enamel scale — "a weatherproof and indestructible metal" (30 marks); in a travelling version with two thermometers, an auger and a screw in a case (40–45 marks); in miniature, 140 mm high; and in the form of a pocket watch with a compass and two thermometers — "the first adjustable precision hair hygrometer of this size", registered design no. 277158. The station hygrometer, showing only relative humidity, cost less. Accessories included window brackets with protective hoods — from plain sheet metal to decorated wrought iron — protective cases for verandas, schools and hospitals, and "Lambrecht's Weather Yearbook", a grid for plotting observations, in two half-yearly booklets, with text in German, French and English.
Barometers. The holosteric barometer — the firm's own aneroid — differed from the market standard on a point of principle: its dial bore no words such as "Stormy, Change, Fair". In their place were a double pointer and a double scale: the right half showed the true pressure at the place of observation, the left the pressure reduced to sea level, so that the owner could compare his reading with the bulletins of the German Naval Observatory. The mean pressure for the particular location was marked on the scale by a horizontal line, and for that reason an order had to state the height of the place above sea level — "which may be ascertained from any senior forestry or railway official, or from a surveyor." Scale diameters ran from 85 to 380 mm, and the movement could be built with a double aneroid capsule for greater sensitivity.
A separate line consisted of mercury barometers. The standard mercury barometer served as the reference by which all aneroids were adjusted. By the middle of the twentieth century the range included the barometer of Lambrecht's own system with a "Bunten point", which traps any air that finds its way into the tube and therefore needs no checking against another instrument; the Fortin barometer, light and gimbal-mounted, for expeditions and levelling work; the ship's barometer, with a constricted tube to prevent the mercury from "pumping" in a swell; the station barometer with a reduced scale, once the model of the Prussian Meteorological Institute and standing at most meteorological stations in Europe and overseas; and finally test barometers for vacuum plant — for equivalent altitudes of eight, twelve, and even twenty thousand metres. Scales were supplied, at choice, in millimetres, millibars or inches.
Altimeters, compasses, pedometers. An entire list was devoted to the traveller's pocket equipment. Altimeter aneroids in nickelled and gilt cases, watch-shaped, with a hinged lid, compensated and with crown winding, with scales to 2,400, 3,000, 4,000 and 5,000 metres; models in a triptych case with compass and ivory thermometer; the "Motor Aneroid" for screwing to a motor car; instruments specially recommended for balloon ascents. Engineers' altimeters for miners and topographers with scales to 8,000 metres. Pocket compasses from one and a half marks; compasses with an agate bearing and a needle lock; a precision compass with a bar needle playing between two rock-crystal lenses that serve at the same time as magnifiers, in a genuine silver mount; the English military model; boat and marine compasses; mining compasses and military compasses of Lieutenant von Troschke's system. And pedometers — with a touching instruction sheet noting that a German soldier takes 1,260 paces to the kilometre, a French, Austrian or Italian soldier 1,333, and a Russian 1,500 paces to the verst, at a stride of 71 centimetres.
Recording instruments. Barographs, thermographs, hygrographs. A clock-driven mechanism turned a drum carrying a paper chart, and a pen at the end of an extended lever traced a continuous curve. The firm emphasised its own solutions: differential adjusting screws allowing the instrument to be set with the utmost precision; cast-iron bases instead of cast bases of drawn metal — "other things being equal they give a smaller mass and therefore a smaller moment of inertia"; and a particular decoupling of the barometric capsules from the mechanism which made the instrument insensitive to shock in transport. Hygrographs worked up to +120 °C, and for higher temperatures there were "immersion" models in which the sensing bodies project into the space being measured while the recording takes place outside.
Field meteorology. Anemometers and wind vanes with Wild's wind-force tables — an iron plate hanging vertically in calm air and deflected the more strongly the harder the wind blows, read against an arc of iron rods. Rain and snow gauges, atmometers, cloud mirrors — a dark or light mirrored disc bearing a compass rose and two concentric circles, by which the direction and relative speed of cloud movement were determined. Campbell–Stokes sunshine recorders: a ground sphere of striae-free glass 96 mm in diameter, acting as a burning lens, and a concentric metal bowl holding paper cards in which the sun burns its trace. There were three kinds of card — short curved ones for winter, long curved ones for summer, straight ones for spring and autumn — and for latitudes above 60° a special model was made with a shortened rotatable bowl: the polar summer demands round-the-clock recording, and the bowl was turned through 120 degrees three times a day.
Air hygiene. The firm regarded this as its second front and pursued it with missionary zeal. As early as 1880 its catalogue printed the argument that in heated rooms in winter the humidity falls to ten or twenty per cent, whereas a healthy person needs about fifty, and quoted Professor Reclam: warm air contains less oxygen, "the appetite diminishes, sleep is short and restless, all the functions of the body leave something to be desired." Out of this grew wall-mounted "advisers" for schools, hospitals and dwellings, "air analysers" with zones of favourable humidity marked on the dial, and two exotic devices: Dr. Casimir Wurster's clothing hygrometer, for investigating "the artificial climate of the body and of clothing", exhibited at the Hygiene Museum in Berlin and used in the clinics of Koch and of Erwin von Esmarch — and Professor Wolpert's carbazidometer, a pocket instrument for determining carbon dioxide in the air, requiring no knowledge whatever of chemistry: several such devices could be charged with solution in advance, and the results of air tests in schools and hospitals worked out at leisure at home, days or weeks later.
Industry. A separate line of hygrometers was intended for spinning and weaving halls, tobacco and cigar warehouses, granaries, slaughterhouses, cold stores, dairies, printing works, telegraph offices, and paper and powder mills. The reference to the expert opinion of the Leipzig Chamber of Commerce, commissioned by the Berlin Court of Appeal — that trade custom accepts a moisture content of seventeen per cent for wool — shows why this mattered: the humidity of air was money, and it had to be proved in court.
And optics. The early Lambrecht called his establishment a "workshop for mechanics and optics", and the 1880 catalogue offered, alongside hygro-barometers, theatre, travelling and marine binoculars with achromatic objectives, in leather cases, with straps and carabiners — from eighteen to thirty-five marks. This branch later fell away, and the firm concentrated on the atmosphere.
Of all the firm's inventions, the one most characteristic of its age was the Wettertelegraph — the "weather telegraph".
The idea was to relieve the observer of calculation entirely. The instrument combined two devices: a holosteric barometer and a thermohygroscope — a peculiar combination of a metal thermoscope and a hair hygroscope, whose pointer depended simultaneously on temperature and on relative humidity and in effect tracked the dew point. One pointer showed the fluctuations of pressure, the other those of the dew point. All that remained for the owner was to find, in the table fixed to the instrument, the cell corresponding to the mutual position of the two pointers, and to read off the forecast.
The name itself was explained by the appearance of that table: combinations of pointers were depicted in pairs, "after the manner of the old optical telegraphs", so that even the wholly uninitiated person, as the advertising promised, recognised the coming weather at once. No regular observations and no calculations were required — one had only, at about eight in the morning, to set the thermohygroscope pointer to the zero mark by means of a special device, and in the evening or the following morning to see where it had gone. For comparison with the previous day there were "marking plates" — separate dials mounted as paperweights, on which the position of the pointers at eight o'clock was recorded; in the better version the setting was made with a key through a rack and pinion, so that no unauthorised hand could disturb the mark.
The instrument was to be placed in a free, airy spot — an open veranda or hallway would do — in the sun where possible, but under a canopy of galvanised or painted sheet iron. And, above all: the forecast tables were supplied in fifteen languages — German, French, English, Italian, Hungarian, Bohemian, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Flemish, Swedish, Finnish, Danish and Romanian. That list says more about the geography of sales than any statistic.
The models bore names that look almost presumptuous today: "Halley" — a massive oak frame about 70 cm high, instruments in turned bronze cases, opal-glass scales, weight about 4.6 kg, price from 100 to 130 marks; "Saussure" — about 60 cm, 80–110 marks; "Torricelli" — the most compact, 54.5 cm and 1.7 kg, 40–50 marks; and "Newton" — a bronzed cast-iron frame 95 cm high and weighing 16 kg, a genuine piece of furniture, 200–250 marks. For private use there was a dispersed arrangement: the thermohygroscope and barometer mounted separately on window brackets outside, with the forecast table inside the room — from 28 to 43 marks.
Between the weather telegraph and the weather column stood an intermediate link — the Wetterwarte, or "weather station": an iron cabinet with a lockable glass door, weatherproof, with a full set of instruments, a forecast table on white enamel, a thermometrograph and a standard thermometer. Such a station was intended for squares, parks, spas and sanatoria, and cost from 85 to 160 marks. From it to the tower on the square was a single step.
If the polymeter was a domestic observatory, the Wettersäule was a public one — and it was the weather column that made Lambrecht's name visible in the literal sense of the word.
The firm stated the aim plainly: the columns were above all to awaken and sustain the public's interest in atmospheric processes. The second aim was "to be an ornament to their place", and accordingly the artistic treatment varied within wide limits, depending on the sum the customer was prepared to spend. In the mid-1890s the price range ran from three hundred marks to fifty thousand.
The construction was thought through to the last detail, and in that thoroughness one sees the hand of a man who had repaired his own instruments many times. The housings were made of wrought iron — a material that combines low weight with great strength. All instrument parts were made of weatherproof materials; scales and inscribed tables were of opal glass with painted, fired-in divisions, or of enamelled iron plate. The moving parts of the mechanisms were neither visible nor accessible from outside: they projected into the well-ventilated interior of the column, protected from sun, rain and "wilful destruction". The plates on which the instruments were mounted lifted out whole, so that a faulty instrument could be exchanged on the spot; and the firm willingly undertook the periodic replacement of the entire set, after which the column looked new again.
A separate page of the catalogue is devoted to glass. The firm did not supply the panes for the doors — "on account of the danger of transport" the customer bought them locally. Siemens wired glass, recommended as a protection against vandals (when broken, the fragments are held by the mesh and the instruments remain inaccessible), Lambrecht rejected for his own purposes: not transparent enough. If, on the other hand, the column stood in a garden or an enclosed park, doors were not needed at all, and some models were built open.
The instrument complement of a column ran to fifteen items, divided into those that indicate directly and those that require attendance:
To these were added scales with historical marks of abnormal weather: "many an observer," the catalogue reasoned, "might be interested to know whether such a storm as is recorded on the column threatens him too." The full complement, however, required an octagonal column: on three-, four- and six-sided ones the most necessary instruments had to be selected.
The columns were advertised with arguments drawn from authority. The catalogues quoted the rapporteur of the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Privy Councillor Schmidt, who declared in a budget speech in the Chamber of Deputies that in weather forecasting the present local weather is of decisive importance, and that from Berlin, despite all telegraphic reports, conditions for a single locality cannot be foreseen with the same certainty as on the spot. From which it followed — in the firm's view — that observation on the spot, on the Lambrecht principle, was and remains the most important thing of all. Beside it was printed a quotation from the director of the Saxon meteorological stations and of the observatory, Privy Court Councillor Dr. Carl Bruhns, to the effect that the genuine investigation of the weather began only with the appearance of measuring instruments.
There was educational literature as well: the booklets Where and How Should Weather Columns Be Built (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1895) and The Weather Column as a Means of Education and Instruction for the People, and Its Value for Practical Life. The jubilee illustrated catalogue of columns was sent out, with a caveat, "only to genuinely interested parties".
One curiosity apart is the indoor version. The 1912 price list carries "Lambrecht's weather column in miniature, the so-called room weather column, of heavy gilt bronze casting, with hygrometer, thermometer, barometer and clock, about 60 cm high" — at 650 marks, dearer than any other item in the catalogue and three times the price of some weather telegraphs.
Wilhelm Lambrecht died on 17 June 1904 after a long illness, in his seventy-first year. His marriage was childless, no direct heirs remained, and the firm was continued as a limited-liability company and then as a joint-stock company — Wilh. Lambrecht A.-G. The title pages of the interwar catalogues preserve the full formula: "Founded 1859. Telephone 3755. Telegraphic address: Lambrechts Wetterwarte. Factory of scientific instruments: meteorology — hygiene — industry." From 1923 the documents record the form of a limited partnership, KG. The founder's gravestone survives in the old municipal cemetery of Göttingen, and in 1964 a Wilhelm-Lambrecht-Strasse appeared in the town's industrial estate.
The catalogue preface dated April 1929 reads as routine: full guarantee of accuracy, design changes possible without notice, prices in the separate enclosed sheet. Behind that ordinariness stands a firm that had passed through a war, a defeat and hyperinflation and had kept its production going.
The Second World War is inscribed in its history more heavily. According to the holdings of the Göttingen municipal archive and the research of the historian Frank Baranowski, the works produced, among other things, early-warning systems for poison gas; the management noted in 1942 that a number of its pre-war special products had now become "important to the war effort". A correspondence of December 1942 survives: the Strasbourg branch of the firm Phywe asked the Göttingen works to determine precisely the extensibility of a consignment of hair after tests of radiosonde specimens carried out by representatives of the army ordnance office. The hair that had served spa promenades for half a century went into military radiosondes.
The use of forced labour is also documented: from May 1939 Czech skilled workers were assigned to the works, and information on forced labourers has been reconstructed by the archive from a sample of the old residents' card index. In the town as a whole, some fourteen thousand seven hundred forced labourers were present in Göttingen during the war years.
The town was taken by American troops and handed over to the British administration on 20 April 1945; it escaped serious destruction. The victors took an immediate interest in the firm's products: on 12 June 1945 the 21st Weather Squadron of the US Army seized materials worth a little over 69,000 Reichsmarks — including about a thousand hygrometers of various patterns — and on 23 July the firm submitted an invoice for the seizure to the military administration.
Post-war recovery was swift. By the early 1950s the firm was printing an export catalogue in English — "Wilh. Lambrecht · Göttingen, Germany. Makers of technical and scientific measuring instruments" — in which window thermometers, thermographs and maximum-and-minimum thermometers were described with the same meticulousness as half a century before, only in another language. By the middle of the decade an oval bearing the words "GEGR. 1859" had appeared in the trademark, and the subtitle read: "Workshops for technical and scientific measuring instruments".
In the 1960s the wording changed once more, and the change is telling: "Wilh. Lambrecht KG Göttingen. Special factory for climatological measurement and control engineering." The key word here is "control": the instruments had ceased to be mere witnesses of the weather and had become components of systems that govern the weather indoors. The catalogue sheets of those years address spinning and weaving halls, warehouses and cold stores, dairies, printing works and telegraph offices.
The hair, meanwhile, had gone nowhere. The round hygrometer no. 194 in a brass case with hammer-finish enamel; the 450 mm enamelled scale of the large hygrometer no. 216 with its two "hair harps"; the thermo-hygrometer no. 198 with curves for absolute humidity and dew point; the polymeter no. 202 and the simplified hygrometer in polymeter form no. 201a — the whole range worked on the same principle. The firm wrote calmly on its leaflets: "For more than a hundred years we have been making instruments for measuring humidity." And for rapidly changing humidity and temperatures below minus ten degrees, a special sensing element, "Pernix", protected by a German patent, appeared — a synthetic substitute for hair, free of its inertia.
Of the origin of its principal product, the leaflets of the 1960s spoke with respectful dryness: "The 'Lambrecht polymeter' is an invention of the founder of our works, which he made as long ago as the end of the last century." Eighty years on, the instrument was still being sold under its own name.
Since 1980 the enterprise has operated as Wilh. Lambrecht GmbH. In 2015 LAMBRECHT meteo GmbH was separated out of it, and in 2019 the brand entered the portfolio of the American group AEM — with the stated rationale that this opens Lambrecht's products to a far wider global audience and connects its sensors with other climate-monitoring technologies. The address has remained the same: Friedländer Weg 65, Göttingen.
The present-day range is a direct continuation of the old catalogue lists, translated into the language of electronics. The weighing precipitation sensors of the rain[e] series weigh every individual drop with a resolution of a thousandth of a millimetre and work all year round without antifreeze; in an independent field trial such an instrument was rated as roughly two hundred times more accurate than a conventional tipping-bucket gauge with a 0.2 mm step. The German Weather Service has used the firm's weighing sensors since 2017, and the tender for the complete replacement of its precipitation-gauge fleet was won by the rain[e]H3 model. Alongside these are ultrasonic anemometers with no moving parts (descendants of the wind vane with Wild's tables), combined sensors for temperature, humidity and pressure, automatic weather stations, and marine versions with an NMEA output. The firm calls itself the world's oldest and most experienced manufacturer of meteorological measuring technology, and this is that rare case in which an advertising formula coincides with a historical fact.
The firm's instruments are held by the Smithsonian Institution, the Science Museum in London, the Whipple Museum in Cambridge and numerous university collections. But the fittest showcase for them is not a museum one. It is an iron tower on a town square, which a passer-by approaches in order to find out whether to take an umbrella.
The history of this firm cannot be set down without a few honest reservations.
The founder's date of birth is contradictory: 25 July 1833 according to the Göttingen municipal archive, against 3 August 1834 according to the German biographical dictionary. The dates of the transition to independent production and of the break with Klinkerfues also differ — 1873 or 1874 — which is probably explained by the overlap of the Vienna and Hanover periods with the return to Göttingen.
The exact numbers of the early German Reich patents granted to Lambrecht have not been established: only the dates are known — 18 July 1880 for the "hygro-barometer" and 1885 for an "instrument for low temperatures". The foreign patents of this family of instruments were taken out in Klinkerfues's name, not Lambrecht's.
The year of the transition to the joint-stock form has not been precisely determined; it can be fixed only from the title pages of the firm's publications. The widespread claim that instruments were supplied to particular polar expeditions is not documented and is not presented here as fact.
And finally, the most essential point. For a century and a half the firm sold one and the same idea in changing casings: that the atmosphere can be measured by simple means, and that the result of the measurement should be intelligible to a person without an education. The hair has been replaced by a capacitive element, the iron tower by an automatic station with telemetry, the forecast table in fifteen languages by a data-transmission protocol. The passer-by who stopped at the column has disappeared. The question he was asking has not.
Nineteenth century
1900–1914
Interwar period
Post-war
Statements drawn from the firm's own catalogues are, by their nature, advertising as well as documentation: prices, dimensions, model names, patent markings and technical descriptions can be taken as reliable, while claims of priority, superiority over competitors and forecasting successes reflect the firm's own voice and are reported here as such. Where secondary sources conflict — above all on the founder's date of birth and on the dating of the break with Klinkerfues — the conflict is stated rather than resolved. Auction and dealer listings, consulted for dated surviving examples, are treated as indicative only.
| List | Contents |
|---|
| 1, 2 | Lambrecht's polymeters and hygrometers |
| 3 | Hygrometers for industrial purposes, carbazidometer |
| 4 | Weather telegraphs, barometers, thermohygroscopes |
| 5 | Hygienic-meteorological observatories |
| 6 | Standard mercury barometers |
| 7, 8 | Dew-point indicators, condensation hygrometers, psychrometers |
| 9 | Hygienic and meteorological-hygienic "advisers" |
| 10 | Thermometers, thermometrographs, patent dial thermometers |
| 11 | Room, window and bath thermometers |
| 12 | "Kosmos" thermometers |
| 13 | Altimeter barometers, compasses, pedometers |
| 14 | Anemometers, wind vanes, cloud mirrors |
| 15 | Rain and snow gauges, atmometers after Dr. Morgenstern |
| 16 | Sunshine autographs |
| 17 | Self-recording baro-, thermo- and hygrometers |
| 18 | Weather columns, sundials |
