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The historical profile of Stäcker & Olms has been thoroughly revised and expanded, tracing the Hamburg firm from its foundation in 1882, through four generations of owners, to the surviving SundO mark of today.
The history section devoted to Stäcker & Olms of Hamburg has undergone a major revision and significant expansion. The updated article follows the firm from its foundation in 1882, in the crowded world of Hamburg barometer workshops that served the port, to its present-day survival as a maker of mechanical measuring instruments under the SundO mark.
The revision draws principally on Gerhard Stöhr's monograph Aneroid-Barometer, die robuste Alternative (2016), which allows the firm's ownership to be traced in unusual detail. Johann Ludwig Nicolaus Stäcker, born 1857, learned precision mechanics under Robert Deutschbein and passed his master's examination in 1881 under Sudmann in Hamburg, presenting an aneroid movement of his own design as his master's piece. His partner Karl Ivan Olms was a merchant — the customary pairing of the trade. Olms's departure is documented, characteristically, by absence: in the Hamburg commercial register entry of 1903/04 Stäcker appears as a mechanic and Olms is no longer mentioned at all, though his initial remained on the sign for another century.
The article follows the succession that carried the firm through the twentieth century: the entry of Theodor Johannes Wirth as a partner in 1919 and his marriage to the founder's daughter Maria; the acquisition of the competing Hamburg firm Heinrich Fröbel Nachf. in 1934, after which both businesses shared a single proprietor while keeping their separate names; the retirement of both managing directors in 1956–57 and the formation of a limited company under Gerhard Hillmann and Walter Jänisch; and the passage of the business to Alfred Hillmann, who entered the firm in 1983 and inherited it on his father's death in 2008.
The expanded profile also treats the product range as recorded in the surviving company catalogues of 1930 and 1936 — aneroid barometers domestic and marine, station-class instruments tested by the Deutsche Seewarte, pocket barometers, the Baro-Discograph disc recorder, thermometers, hygrometers and combined weather stations — together with the firm's constructional hallmarks, its trade partnerships, its addresses in Eimsbüttel and Stellingen, and the post-war years down to the liquidation of SUNDO GmbH in 2018 and the mark's continuing life in an unexpected niche: instruments for saunas and the wellness trade.
The article closes with a full annotated bibliography, and notes one point on which the published accounts diverge — the dating of Stäcker's master's piece, which a recent essay of the German Meteorological Society places in 1903, apparently conflating the examination of 1881 with the register entry of two decades later.