Our history of Wilh. Lambrecht of Göttingen has been substantially expanded.
The site's account of — the Göttingen maker founded in 1859 and still in business today — has been rewritten and considerably enlarged. The new version draws on a run of original factory catalogues and price lists spanning more than a century, from the autumn catalogue of 1880 to the product leaflets of the mid-1960s.
Several sections are new. One chapter reconstructs the firm's full product range as it appeared in the eighteen numbered catalogue lists: polymeters and hair hygrometers, holosteric and mercury barometers, altimeters, compasses and pedometers, recording instruments, Campbell–Stokes sunshine recorders, hygiene apparatus, and — in the earliest years — theatre and marine binoculars. A second chapter is devoted to the Wettertelegraph, the pointer-and-table instrument that delivered a forecast without any calculation, and whose prognosis tables were supplied in fifteen languages.
The longest addition covers the weather columns. Working from the firm's own illustrated column catalogue, it describes the construction of the wrought-iron housings and all fifteen instruments that could be fitted to a column — including the soil thermometers, the insolation thermometer and the rotating "sunset disc" — together with the reasoning behind them. Few of these columns survive, which makes the documentary record of what they once carried worth setting down in full.
The account also covers the founder's biography, his quarrel with the astronomer Klinkerfues, the firm's work under National Socialism including its documented use of forced labour, and its present-day products. Points on which the sources contradict one another are stated rather than smoothed over, and a full list of sources is appended.
