A Japanese Ship's Barometer Joins the Collection
A Spring-Suspended Marine Aneroid made in October 1969 by Nihon Kisho Sokki of Tokyo has joined the collection, together with the first detailed history of its little-known maker.
The collection has gained a Spring-Suspended Marine Aneroid made by Nihon Kisho Sokki Co., Ltd. of Tokyo for the Yokohama marine instrument firm Utsuki Keiki Seisakusho. The dial is stamped "44—10", which in the Japanese calendar means October of Shōwa 44, that is, October 1969. The barometer was built for the wheelhouse of a merchant ship.
Its pale green aluminium case hangs on pre-tensioned extension springs arranged in V-shaped pairs. They isolate it from the constant vibration of the ship's engines and propeller. Beneath its plain exterior is an unusually refined movement. Two opposed capsule stacks distinguish a change in pressure from shaking. The pointer arbor is driven by a preloaded twin-chain fusee transmission and carries no hairspring of its own. A bimetallic strip compensates for temperature. The silvered dial has a mirror band to prevent parallax, and for calibration the whole dial can be rotated from outside the case.
Very little was known about the maker until now, so a full history of the company has been published alongside the instrument. Archival directories show that Nihon Kisho Sokki was founded in Ginza in July 1943. Its first address was the annex of the K. Hattori & Co. clock house, the forerunner of Seiko. It was headed by Hattori's general manager, Hijikata Shōgo, and its board included a director of the old instrument house of Tamaya and two Tokyo makers of recording instruments. The firm had a factory in Kawasaki. For decades it worked largely for other brands: altimeters and barometers bearing the names Hattori and Tamaya were in fact made by Nihon Kisho Sokki. A separate chapter covers its customer Utsuki Keiki, a firm that began in 1905 as a repairer of marine chronometers. The barometer's full catalogue description and the company history are now available on the site.