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Our article on the Paris barometer and manometer makers Dubois et Casse has been completely rewritten from archival documents. Two long-standing errors are corrected, and a substantial body of newly traced evidence — patents, exhibition awards, directory entries and the firm’s own succession — is published here for the first time.
The entry on Dubois et Casse has been rebuilt from the ground up. Rather than repeating the account that has circulated among collectors, the new text rests on documents: patent catalogues, the Bulletin des lois, the Didot-Bottin trade directories, official exhibition award lists, a finding aid of the Service historique de la Défense, and a Brussels commercial annuaire. Every claim now carries a direct link to the source page.
Two corrections matter most.
Alfred Casse was not Dubois's partner. The partner was Charles Casse. Alfred Casse was an entirely separate maker — successor to Guilbert & Cie and later absorbed by Maxant. The Didot-Bottin for 1891 lists both firms in the same trade rubric, on consecutive lines and at different addresses, which settles the question.
The firm never moved. Its address appears to change from rue du Grand-Saint-Michel to rue du Terrage, but the street was simply renamed in 1867. The workshop stood on the same spot for its entire existence — a fact the 1870 directory records explicitly.
Among the new material: the sole surviving trace of Dubois's forename, the initial E., in the Bulletin des lois of 1862; the firm's legal status as a société en nom collectif; three patents with numbers and dates (1860, 1861, 1863); a previously unrecorded honourable mention at the Évreux regional show of 1864; two honourable mentions in two separate classes at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1867; and silver and bronze medals at Paris 1878, won by Charles Casse alone.
The article also fixes the succession: the partnership ended in 1868–1869, with the directories printing the formula "Ch. Casse successeur", and the line continued under Charles Casse until roughly 1898.
Finally, contemporary engineering literature credits the seamless corrugated tube — the firm's defining invention and an ancestor of the modern bellows — personally to Casse.