Barometers Realm

An unusually attractive piece of commercial correspondence from the Vereinigte Barometer-Fabriken Möller, Oehmichen & Co., better known under the trademark MOCO, one of Hamburg’s important manufacturers of domestic barometers and related meteorological instruments.

Dated 12 November 1930, the letter was sent to Gustav Charitius of Weimar on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Charitius was a master precision mechanic who had established his workshop in Weimar in 1879; the business subsequently developed into an optical establishment and remained in the family until 1936, when it was taken over by his son Otto Charitius. A surviving history of the later firm also records that Gustav Charitius had acquired knowledge from Carl Zeiss, placing him within the wider network of German precision mechanics and optical craftsmen of the late nineteenth century.

The text itself is brief but revealing. Möller, Oehmichen & Co. states that it learned of Charitius’s birthday from the Deutsche Optische Wochenschrift, demonstrating the close relationship between the German optical, precision-mechanical and meteorological-instrument trades. The letter is therefore more than a private congratulatory note: it documents professional contact within a specialist commercial community in which opticians, instrument makers and retailers frequently dealt in overlapping categories of scientific apparatus. Of particular importance is the highly elaborate letterhead. A large aneroid barometer dominates the left side, while behind it appears a harbour with ships, suggesting the importance of maritime trade and export to the Hamburg manufacturer. On the right is a detailed illustration of the factory complex in Hamburg-Stellingen. Together with the MOCO trademark and extensive banking, telegraphic and telephone details, the design presents the company as a substantial, modern industrial concern.