Short & Mason: A Major Revision of Our Company History
Our history of Short & Mason has been rewritten from the ground up. The founders’ biographies are reconstructed for the first time, the firm’s two forgotten predecessor partnerships are documented, and several dates that have circulated for decades in the trade are corrected against primary sources.
The revised history replaces a short, thin account with a continuous narrative covering the full span from 1864 to 1969. The most substantial addition concerns Thomas Watling Short himself. Before Short & Mason existed, he was a partner in two other London firms: Marratt & Short, opticians and mathematical instrument makers of 63 King William Street, dissolved in February 1867; and Pitkin & Short of 56 Red Lion Street, Clerkenwell, dissolved on Christmas Eve 1870. The second of these is the more important. Its formal description — — is the earliest documented appearance of the aneroid in Short’s career, and points to James Pitkin as the probable source of the craft on which the whole later firm was built. Setting the three dissolution notices side by side also reveals something not previously noted: between 1864 and 1867 Short was a partner in at least two businesses simultaneously. William James Mason has been corrected too. He was not, as is often repeated, the commercial half of the partnership, but a working engineer — recorded in 1871 as employing six men, and in 1911 as a retired gas engineer. Pressure, gauges and gas-tightness: precisely the skills the firm would live on. On the disputed dates, the revision takes a clear position. The founding year is 1864. The 1875 given by several museums reflects the firm’s first appearance in trade directories, not its formation. The 1900 Taylor transaction was a purchase that left Short & Mason trading in England under its own name; the name itself did not lapse until the merger of 1969. Where sources genuinely diverge, the article now explains the mechanism of the divergence — most usefully, the habit of the of publishing dissolutions months after the fact. The article also gains a practical appendix on dating instruments by address, patent number, marking and serial format, and a list of the questions still open — beginning with the firm’s whereabouts during its first decade, 1864 to 1873, which remains unknown.