New Essay: Paper Meteorology
A long read on cobalt hygrometer cards, donkey barometers and the century-old habit of laughing at weather instruments, illustrated throughout from the foundation's collection.
A new essay by Leo Shirokov is now available: Paper Meteorology. Cobalt Postcards, Donkey Barometers and the Caricature of the Instrument.
It starts in the workshop. After finding a French Baromètre artistique card from the interwar years, the author set out to rebuild the recipe behind it: gum arabic, cobalt chloride, a little salt, three drops of glycerine, and several months of trials with wet paper and jars of saturated solutions. The result is a series of four new cards that change colour with the humidity, and a first-hand account of everything that can go wrong on the way there, including a whole print run delivered on the wrong paper.
From there the essay moves to the strange second branch of the genre: the donkey barometer, a piece of card with a real tail attached, which does not work and never pretended to. Its trail runs from a Chicago publisher who took out copyright on the joke in 1906, through Donald McGill and a brass fittings company in Cleveland, to the weather rocks still hanging outside pubs today. Along the way there are two cartoons worth knowing about, one from Punch in 1901 and one from Le Charivari in 1868, in which the barometer stops measuring the weather and starts measuring the police and the coming war. A closing chapter tips its hat to the weather house and the Spanish weather friar.
Eighteen illustrations, almost all from the foundation's collection. Available as a PDF.