Not Just Brass and Glass

Photos by Jacquelyn E. Salive

© 1995 by Maine Antique Digest

Wow! What a collection of scientific tools and instruments!

Polished brass gleamed, and the odor of fine lubricating oil mixed with the faint musty odor of an old college science lab at the 20th Maryland Microscopical and Scientific Instrument Society (MMSIS) show and sale on April 2. The society has been putting on a show twice annually for the last ten years. It is the only regularly scheduled collectors' swap show and sale devoted to antique scientific instruments and equipment in the United States. Worldwide, the only other regularly scheduled sales of these artifacts are at the English auction houses of Christie's, Sotheby's, Bonhams, and Phillips, in order of decreasing frequency.

This is the fourth year the show has been held at the Calverton, Maryland, Holiday Inn, just off I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Dr. Sam Koslov, vice-president of MMSIS, said 72 tables were filled with goodies from about 50 dealers and collectors. Collectors who are club members frequently share a bit of their table with a friend who has an item or two to sell. The dealers and collectors came from as far away as Ontario, Canada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and Delaware, as well as Maryland. The exhibitors were the usual mixture of full- and part-time dealers and collectors who were pruning their collections for all the usual reasons: too much stuff, two of a kind, to raise cash for that "I gotta have it" item needed to fill a hole in the collection, or to upgrade to a "museum quality" piece.

About half of the exhibitors were selling "brass and glass," and 40% sold used equipment for reuse and for parts to rebuild or repair existing old equipment. Dealers in old scientific books accounted for about 10% of the exhibitors.

The MMSIS show opens to the public at 10 a.m. with a strict "NO EARLY BIRDS" policy. Dr. Koslov said that the pre-opening activity and trading got a little out of hand several years ago, and they had to put a stop to it. Besides, this policy is fairer to the paid admission crowd who would like a shot at the "good stuff" too.

I couldn't believe the paid attendance at the six-hour show was only 223. Aisles were packed, and there was a steady flow in and out of the showroom during the four hours I was there. Koslov tells me that the hustle and bustle during the show is magnified by the excitement generated by the many dealers and club members buying and trading among themselves. There sure were a lot of smiling faces on the package-laden people exiting the room.

The offerings included optical equipment, such as microscopes, astronomical telescopes, surveying transits, navigational instruments, binoculars, movie and still cameras, and opthamological devices; scales, weights, and balances; medical instruments, ranging from birthing forceps to cased sets of surgical saws and knives; antique watchmakers' precision tools and lathes; mathematical instruments, such as slide rules, Fuller's cylindrical calculators, Napierian tables, and hand-cranked mechanical calculators; innumerable cased sets of antique drafting instruments, rulers, and measuring scales; and old radios, galvanometers, and 19th-century high-voltage equipment.

If you didn't know how to use all this beautiful old high-tech equipment, at least four dealers had leather-bound tomes of scientific and technical information. Available were antique scientific books ranging from Darwin's first editions to books filled with steel plate engravings of flora, fauna, strange beasties, and portraits of the great scientists. Other dealers often had a few scientific books and pamphlets on their tables.

Dr. Koslov said the visitors and customers at these shows are typically engineers, scientists, medical doctors, retired naval officers, and the technologically adept. Since these are still male-dominated professions, the crowd at the show was conspicuously male dominated, about 95% men. Koslov said the women collectors who attend are also from high-technology fields and include medical doctors, research scientists, and laboratory technicians. It should be pointed out that the expert on American Grunow microscopes at this show was Debbie Warner, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution. John Bell, a collector who specializes in American-made microscopes, told me that several of the women he knows who collect microscopes are also museum curators.

The one item at the show that you could mention and everyone immediately remembered was Philip Pfeifer's big (about 18" diameter) brass circumferentor made by Seguel Wm. Collier, 1712-30. This antique circumferentor, a non-optical sighting device used in surveying that became obsolete with the introduction of the theodolite, is an extravagantly and beautifully engraved heavy brass disk with four raised brass sighting slots spaced at 90-degree intervals and its original compass mounted in the center. The compass was also finely made with a highly decorated card. This gleaming beauty, which came with its original case and fence post mount, drew every passerby's attention and admiration. Unfortunately for the admirers, Pfeifer had it priced $18,500.

Cased microscopes were seen on about half the display tables and ranged from contemporary gray enamel Bausch & Lomb scopes, through 120-year-old highly polished brass English Y-shaped binocular scopes with original accessories housed in fitted brass-bound mahogany cases, to a 140-year-old American Grunow microscope rarer than those on display at the local museums. Microscope prices ranged from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. John Bell said you can get an American-made cased Grunow microscope for $1500 and up. I think there should be emphasis on the "up." Another collector told me he picked up four nice old microscopes for his collection, a large 1880 Ross, an 1840 Carpenter, an 1840 Oberhouser, and an 1885 Pilcher, for a total of $4000.

Two Grunow microscopes were sold at the show, one by John Bell of Maryland and the other by Gordon Reithmeier of Toronto, Ontario. Reithmeier got his Grunow in trade on Thursday, brought it to the show, and sold it almost as soon as the show opened on Sunday morning. He probably got a good price, since Reithmeier's Grunow was one of the earliest ones made, having no serial number and an unusual Brooklyn, L.I. address. He dated it at 1852-53 after consulting Sunday with Smithsonian curator Debbie Warner, author of one of the better papers on Grunow.

Reithmeier himself is something of an expert on dating microscopes. He publishes a booklet, Serial Number Reference Guide for Antique Microscopes, about 30 pages of single-spaced data on the major microscope manufacturers, priced at $20. You can look up the manufacturer in his guide and then use the microscope's serial number to quickly determine the year in which the microscope was made.

James Kennedy Antiques, Ltd., Durham, North Carolina, had an unbelievable three-table display of gleaming brass microscopes, astronomical telescopes, medical instruments, and old scientific items to use as decorative items. But forget the microscopes, telescopes, and boxed and cased sets of goodies. The treasure that fascinated me the most was his circa 1890 English Tokington and Gibbs heliochro-nometer, an elaborate brass sundial that could keep time accurately within one minute, regardless of the season or how high the sun is in the sky. I've had modern wristwatches that lost more than a minute a day!

The heliochronometer sundial is the flat face of a brass hemisphere that had its angle of orientation changed to compensate for seasonal variation in solar position by moving a lever and rotating a dial on the face to set the month and day. The gnomon of a sundial is the rod that casts the shadow, and it must be parallel to the axis of the earth. The inventor must have been a mechanical genius as well as an awesome astronomer to figure out how to make a gadget like that. It was marked $1500.

Among a collection of physics lecture demonstration-sized galvanometers and instruments, Ron McClellan of West Chester, Pennsylvania, had a pointer galvanometer for $150, a student's tangent compass galvanometer in an oak frame for $145, and an L.E. Knott mirror galvanometer for $145. After we looked at the gear on the next table, James Kreuzer pulled out photos of his real passion, old Marconi radios. His collection is so good, he has been hired on occasion by the Marconi Company to display them at technical meetings in this country.

Another dealer exhibiting at this show was Robert G. Luther, whose business, It's About Time, has space at the Emmitsburg (Maryland) Antique Mall. Luther brought a variety of watchmakers' tools and some decorative antiques. A tiny antique black enamel Wilcox and Gibbs sewing machine painted with lots of decorative scrollwork was $88. For $195 he had "The Servant's Friend Patent Knife Cleaner," manufactured circa 1880 by Spong & Co., that he had picked up at the estate of Herbert Hollerith, developer of the punch card system used to compile the data in the 1890 census. (The company founded to do this analytical work eventually became IBM; Luther thought this was a great provenance, since he's an IBM retiree.) The knife cleaner used a mildly abrasive powder, such as pumice, and leather polishing leaves to remove rust from the old carbon steel kitchen knives. Joe Mossi told me that the old Swiss chefs he knew used a different approach to getting the rust off those old steel knives; they just kept a bucket of sand in the kitchen, and a few quick stabs in the sand would take off the rust.

To draw attention to his display, Luther had a miniature French machine shop operating on his table in its original 16" x 32" glass display case. Luther got the shop at an auction in Frederick, Maryland, and thought it was probably made during the 1920's or '30's. The little shop has an overhead belt and pulley power transfer system driven by a tiny electric motor. The pulleys have old-fashioned C-shaped curved spokes. The shop has two floor lamps with brass shades, two floor-mounted grinding wheels, a table saw, a stamping press to punch holes, a drill press, a two-hammer forge pounding away, and a lathe with a fancy face plate; all were operating.

Luther said he had taken it all apart, cleaned and polished the unpainted metal parts, and used watch oil or electric motor oil on all the bearings and oil ports on these tiny machines. He hadn't had time to get the belts he needed to run everything, so he was using rubber bands to transfer power to the tools. Luther said the rubber bands would last about a day before they would break. The brass-shaded floor lamps looked like miniature old Parisian street lamps and were being powered by hidden flashlight batteries. Luther offered this display for $1495 and sold it the next day to a buyer who had seen it at the show and phoned to see if he still had it.

One of the book dealers, J.F. Ptak, was selling books as his tiny daughter rode on his shoulders. His book shop is J.F. Ptak Science Books in Alexandria, Virginia, and his Internet address is jfptak@access.digex.net, if you have any questions. Among the books he brought to the show were a leather-bound Hertz's Collected Works (Gesammete Werke), dated 1895, and a second edition of Darwin's Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, dated 1874 and inscribed as having been awarded as a Queen's Prize to Francis Davis in 1876 ($300). In addition to his 50,000 science books in stock, Ptak sells American maps, maps of the world, architecture prints, technological images, mythological images, portraits, and science images.

While most of the public outside "the beltway" thinks the Baltimore-Washington megalopolis is home to politicians, postal clerks, and "infernal revenuers," close to "the beltway" is actually home to many of the government's high-tech scientific and engineering research centers and numerous colleges and universities. The professionals employed at these places typically have six or more years of college with a variety of graduate degrees in the hard sciences, such as biology, chemistry, engineering, math, medicine, physics, and astronomy. As a result of all this education and the limited number of people with such technical knowledge, these professionals draw good salaries, which helps to explain the deep pockets filled with the cash needed to purchase these beautiful and sometimes expensive antique brass and glass collectibles.

The next Maryland Science and Microscope Society show and sale will be held at the Calverton, Maryland, Holiday Inn, just off I-95 between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, on November 5. For more information about membership, member services, and the society's semiannual shows, contact Dr. Sam Koslov at (703) 893-9102.