The One That Got Away

A few months ago, I came upon an interesting Brandis sextant on an online auction web site.  Alas, I was unable to participate in the auction except to put in a bid a day or so before it was held, and my bid was bested by a small sum by the only other bidder who apparently took an interest in this item.  So, I lost my chance to own a sextant that I think has a particularly interesting history.

I noticed when I saw the lead photo in the auction catalog (see below) that this was not just another Brandis nautical sextant, it was a Byrd sextant.  Byrd sextants were one of the first types of sextants specifically devised for aerial navigation.  The leveling device was a spirit tube mounted to the frame beyond the horizon glass.  It was the spirit level, and a wire leading from it to the sextant’s handle (the spirit level could be illuminated at night by a small light bulb that was powered by battery in the sextant’s handle), that led me to recognize what I was looking at.  A Byrd sextant was aboard the NC-4, the U.S. Navy Curtiss seaplane that made the first-ever flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1919.  But by the mid-1920s, the Byrd sextant had been replaced by other types of bubble sextants.

I know of only a few other surviving examples of Byrd sextants, all of them built on Brandis nautical sextant frames.  One example, Brandis #5296/USNO #2977, is at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. [1]; this Byrd sextant flew on one of the Navy-Curtis seaplanes involved in the NC-4 transatlantic flight of 1919.  The Smithsonian’s web site says that this particular sextant was donated by P. V. H. Weems, the U. S. Navy officer who was one of the great pioneers of early air navigation methods and equipment [2].  A second Byrd sextant, Brandis #5292/USNO #2975, also flew on one of the NC seaplanes that attempted the 1919 transatlantic flight; it appeared on an auction web site several years ago and presumably is now in a private collection.  A third Byrd sextant, Brandis #4180/USNO #2859, belongs to Bill Morris, author of the excellent book The Nautical Sextant [3], and the equally excellent blog that complements the book [4].

Those are the only three surviving Byrd sextant I know of; quite possibly there are others, but I suspect not many others.  Just from the standpoint of its rarity, I thought this Byrd sextant was worth having.  But when I looked at the additional photos in the catalog listing, this sextant seemed even more interesting.  It has a micrometer scale rather than the tangent screw and vernier scale that is seen on the other three Byrd sextants; the clamping mechanism is also different (see below).  So I think this may be a somewhat later version of a Byrd sextant than the other three, the micrometer and clamp features intended to make it easier to use in flight.

One photo in the auction catalog shows that the sextant’s box has a Naval Observatory inspection certificate attached to it (see below).  The original Brandis serial number written on the certificate, 5996, is crossed out and written below it is the number 6006; photos of the frame of this sextant don’t show us which, if either, of these two numbers corresponds to its Brandis serial number.  More interesting is that the inspection certificate indicates the class of sextant to be “aeronautical”.  The inspection certificate for Brandis #5292, one of the Byrd sextants from the 1919 transatlantic flights, indicates it to be a “surveying sextant”, as do the inspection certificates of many U.S. Navy sextants that were used strictly for nautical purposes.  I think this lends support to the notion that this sextant was from the outset made for aeronautical navigation, not for maritime navigation.  Another interesting thing is that in the upper right hand corner of the inspection certificate is written “Weems 805W”.  I don't know what the “805W” refers to, but “Weems" must refer to the very PVH Weems whom I mentioned above.  It seems possible that this particular Byrd sextant was once in the possession of the great air navigation pioneer himself during that early period when he and others were working to advance the design of the aeronautical sextant.

In summary, while the three other Byrd sextants appear to be retrofitted Brandis nautical sextants taken from the run of 2400 sextants that Brandis produced for the U.S. Navy during the first World War [5], the Brandis Byrd sextant I failed to win at auction seems to be a somewhat later sextant specifically made for aeronautical use.  The Naval Observatory inspection certificate is dated October 8, 1920, so this provides a ‘no later than’ date for when Brandis #5996 was manufactured.  It seems likely that it was made some time after the Byrd sextants that flew on the May, 1919 NC transatlantic flights, so the date of manufacture of Brandis #5996 was probably some time between May, 1919 and October, 1920 [6], so it fits nicely into the Brandis serial number chronology I’ve been developing.

Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are always welcome (no one will be banned, blocked, or castigated for offering differing opinions).  Send corespondance to gardnersghost@gmail.com 

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Footnotes and references
[1] http://amhistory.si.edu/navigation/object.cfm?recordnumber=451576
[2] http://timeandnavigation.si.edu/navigating-air/early-air-navigators/charles-lindbergh/business-of-air-navigation/p-v-h-weems
[3] The Nautical Sextant, W. J. Morris. Paradise Cay Publications, Inc. Arcata, California. 2010.
[4] http://sextantbook.com/?s=byrd
[5] See the earlier post titled 'What do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Three'
[6]  The actual Brandis serial number of the sextant I bid on was more likely 6006 than 5996, but I think that date range likely applies to Brandis #6006 as well.

A Fish Story

I haven’t posted in a while, and I think it may be a while yet before I make another long post.  In the meanwhile, a true story about the one that didn’t get away might be of interest to some in my vast readership.
 
An article that appeared in the January 1931 issue of Flying Magazine tells the story of a Long Island fisherman who discovered a sextant in his net while fishing halfway between Montauk Point and Block Island:

The fisherman, Arthur G. Wood, 94 Saxton Avenue, Sayville, L.I., took the sextant home with him, cleaned the corroded metal and read from the small plate:

            Brandis & Sons, Inc.
            Brooklyn, N.Y.
            6255
            Aeronautical Octant
            Mark 1    Model 2

The article goes on to say that the sextant was traced back to a U. S. Navy Lieutenant Schildhauer, who lost the sextant in 1928 when his U. S. Navy PN-12 flying boat was forced to land at sea due to engine trouble.

This fit-for-Ripley’s fish story is not only mildly entertaining, it provides us with another data point for the Brandis serial number chronology.  ‘Mark 1 Model 2 Brandis Aeronautical Octant’ is the name U.S. Navy gave to an early version of the Brandis Model 206 bubble sextant, which was introduced in 1925.  Therefore Lt. Schildhauer’s (or should we say Arthur Wood’s) Brandis #6255 sextant must have been made sometime between 1925 and 1928.

 At some point I will post an updated Brandis serial number chronology table that will include Brandis #6255 and perhaps some additional data points.

Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are always welcome (no one will be banned, blocked, or castigated for offering differing opinions).  Send corespondance to gardnersghost@gmail.com 

Some Old Brandis Surveying Instruments

The Brandis serial number chronology presented in the post ‘What do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Two’ provides a pretty narrow range for the date of manufacture of the hypothetical Brandis #3500/USNO#1542 sextant, but it only sparsely covers the first decade of the 20th century.  This earlier period won’t help us date the Nikumaroro sextant box, but developing as complete a Brandis serial chronology is a good thing nonetheless.  Four time points for the 1900-1910 period can be established thanks to Robert Parrish of Antiquesurveying.com.  Robert’s impressive collection of surveying instruments includes six Brandis surveying instruments that can be dated in a very straightforward way: they are marked with the year in which they were manufactured.  The Brandis serial numbers and dates are listed in the table below.
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Instrument	Brandis Number	Date
Wye Level	2106	1905
Theodolite	2225	1906
Surveying	2290	1906
Theodolite	2309	1907

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In the photos below we can see how these markings appear on two instruments, a Wye level and a theodolite.

Photos Courtesy of Robert Parrish

Both instruments have the date-appropriate firm name of ‘F.E. Brandis, Sons & Co’, and both are marked “The President Borough of Richmond”, presumably their original owner (the ‘Borough of Richmond’ is very likely the part of New York City commonly called Staten Island).  The Wye level, Brandis #2106, is marked with the number 1905, while the theodolite, Brandis #2225, is marked with the number 1906; Robert thinks all of these markings were factory-engraved.  Can we be sure that the 1905 and 1906 are dates and not owner serial numbers?  I think we can, because another of Robert’s surveying instruments, Brandis #2290, is also marked 1906.  It’s not clear whether Brandis #2290 was also owned by the Borough of Richmond, but if it was, it would make little sense for it to be marked with the same owner’s serial number as Brandis #2225; if Brandis #2290 had a different owner then it would be quite a coincidence for it to have the same owner’s serial number as Brandis #2225.  I also note that 1905 and 1906 make sense as the years in which these instruments were made: they post-date the establishment of the Borough of Richmond in 1898 and they pre-date the 1911 delivery date of the sextant with Brandis serial number 2763 discussed in What do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Two, as they should if lower Brandis serial numbers correspond to earlier manufacture dates.  Robert Parrish cautions that some instrument manufacturers assigned blocks of serial numbers to a single type of instrument or a single worker, which would tend to disrupt any order between manufacture date and manufacturer’s serial number; so far, I am not seeing signs of such discontinuities in the Brandis serial number chronology.

I’ll post an updated Brandis serial number chronology table that incorporates these surveying instruments, the Brandis #3249 peephole sextant, and any other datable Brandis instruments that might happen to come along; I’m hoping to get useful dating on one or two more Brandis instruments, so I may wait for a little while before updating the table.

Note added,  June 2018:  This post originally included information about two other Brandis instruments Robert Parrish provided date of manufacture information for, however I later realized these were not instruments owned by Mr. Parrish and will discuss them in a separate post.  Also, I should soon be publishing the long-promised revised Brandis serial number chronology table.

Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are always welcome (no one will be banned, blocked, or castigated for offering differing opinions).  Send corespondance to gardnersghost@gmail.com  

A Strange Beast

While I’m not intending to make posts about every new Brandis instrument that turns up, a very interesting Brandis sextant and box appeared on eBay yesterday that I think is worth commenting about.  The sextant, Brandis #3249/USNO#836, is marked with the ‘Brandis & Sons, Mfg Co.’ firm name, and seems at first glance to be a common run-of-the-mill Brandis surveying sextant.  I noticed that the sextant didn’t have a telescope, but it’s not so unusual for sextant components to go missing from sextant boxes over the decades.  I also noticed that the sextant box was marked with the later ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc’ firm name marking, but a number of sextants that have turned up for sale are no longer in their original boxes, so that didn’t seem so unusual, either.  Then, taking a closer look at the photos of the sextant in the box, I realized this sextant wasn’t your average Brandis surveying sextant.  It wasn’t missing its telescope—it probably never had one.  Where a telescope would normally be attached there was instead an odd, two-wheeled contraption. 

I’ve never seen a sextant like this one before, but I’m no sextant expert so I alerted someone who is a true authority on sextants about this sextant.  He told me he had never seen anything like it either.  One of the two wheels contains four small glass windows, and I suspect each of them is tinted to a different degree.  It would appear that the idea here is that the user can rotate this wheel to align one of the four tinted windows with a peephole in the other wheel, and then sight objects through the sextant’s mirrors.  My sextant expert friend pointed out that there are situations in which one might want a wider field of view than is obtained using a sextant telescope.  He also told me (to borrow closely from his message to me) that telescopes were seldom used in small vessels before 'zero magnification sighting tubes' became the norm, and that Captain Cook on the voyage of the Resolution had wondered whether the use of a telescope had anything to offer.  My friend also said that he himself recently was sailing in rough seas and found that he needed to remove his sextant’s telescope to bring the sun down and then replace the telescope to make his final readings.  So, as best I can figure, it would seem that Brandis #3249/USNO #836 was made for use in situations in which high precision measurements were not needed or were not possible.  If anyone thinks they’ve got a better explanation, or if my sextant expert friend finds that I’ve misunderstood what he has tried to explain to me, I am quite happy to be corrected.

Another thing that is very interesting here is that, as I mentioned above, the firm name marking of the box does not match the firm name marking of the sextant.  It could be that Brandis #3249 is just another example of a sextant that got separated from its original sextant box, but I’m not so sure that is the case.  Brandis #3249/USNO#836 fits snugly in the box it is in, and the box does not contain the usual telescope holders, so the box appears in this regard to have been made to accommodate the sextant it currently houses.  On the other hand, the sextant box has a holder for shade glasses that this sextant does not have, and so in this respect the sextant and box don’t match. In a previous post, I showed that the change from the ‘Mfg Co.’ firm name marking to the ‘Inc.’ firm name marking on Brandis sextants occurred between the making of Brandis #3243 and Brandis #3331.  Here we have in Brandis#3249/USNO#836 a sextant with the earlier firm name marking in a box with the latter firm name marking; I wonder if what we see here is sort of like a missing link fossil that in this case captures that transition in the Brandis firm name.  It seems possible, though not provable, that this sextant and sextant box came out of Brandis during the period it was changing firm names, so the sextant got one name and the sextant box, the other.

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Additional thoughts:

(5/7/15) Perhaps what I took to be a holder in the box for (unnecessary) shades is in fact a holder for spare mirrors, though mirrors would seem to be rather delicate items to carry as spares.  Also, it occurs to me that the two-wheeled contraption could have been made at Naval Observatory to replace the usual telescope bracket, so perhaps this was some sort of experimental instrument cooked up at the Naval Observatory.

(5/24/15)  After making this post, I came upon a 19th century octant that is being offered for sale by Antiques of the Sea (http://www.antiquesofthesea.com/instruments.html), a nautical instrument dealer, shown below.  This instrument uses a peephole sight rather than a telescope; the dealer also is selling another quite old double peephole sight octant.  So, while Brandis #3249 isn’t your typical Brandis sextant, peephole sight instruments were apparently nothing new back when it was manufactured.

Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are always welcome (no one will be banned, blocked, or castigated for offering differing opinions).  Send corespondance to gardnersghost@gmail.com  

What do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Three

The Brandis serial number chronology presented in the last post indicates that there was a rapid increase in the production of Brandis instruments between 1917 and 1919: Brandis produced about 1134 instruments between 1900 and 1915, an average of about 76 per year, while it produced over 2000 instruments between 1917 and 1919, more than 1000 instruments per year.  In this post, I’ll present several additional sources of information that corroborate the timing and magnitude of this increase in production of Brandis instruments and link it to the United States’ entry into World War I in 1917.  These sources also help to narrow the date range over which the hypothetical Brandis#3500/USNO#1542 sextant would have been made, and provide evidence that Brandis assigned its serial number 3500 to a sextant rather than to any other kind of precision instrument it manufactured.

The first source of information we’ll look at are the annual reports of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which typically reported the number of new sextants inspected during the year (1).  The Naval Observatory’s annual reports were written on a fiscal year basis, which at this time began on July 1 of the calendar year, e.g., the Naval Observatory’s annual report for fiscal year 1916 covers the period from July 1, 1915 to June 30, 1916.  In the table below, I’ve compiled the Naval Observatory sextant inspection data for fiscal years 1916 through 1922; a caveat is that the annual report for fiscal year 1918 gives the only total number of sextants inspected, new and old, so it is not clear how many of the 818 sextants inspected in this period were new ones.  I will assume here that all the sextants inspected in fiscal year 1918 were new sextants; while that may not be precisely correct, I think information that will be presented later suggests that a large majority of them were in fact new sextants.

We can see that there was a rapid increase in the number of new sextants inspected at the Naval Observatory that coincided with the rapid increase in the production of Brandis instruments between 1917 and 1919 indicated by the Brandis serial number chronology.  Not all of these sextants could have been made by Brandis; we know that the instrument manufacturers Keuffel & Esser and Buff & Buff also supplied sextants to the U.S. Navy during this period because about a quarter of the World War I era Naval Observatory-inspected sextants on Tighar’s sextant number list (2) were made by these two companies.  However, the preponderance of Brandis sextants on Tighar’s list suggests that Brandis was the largest supplier of sextants to the Navy during World War I, and therefore the trend seen in the USNO annual reports must to a significant degree reflect the trend in production of Brandis sextants.

Information appearing in three publications brings Brandis’ wartime work supplying sextants to the U.S. Navy into sharper focus.  The trade journal Jewelers’ Circular-Weekly in its October 10, 1917 (3) contains a brief notice stating:  “An award has also been made to Brandis & Sons Co. of Brooklyn for furnishing 1,000 surveying sextants at $98,250”.  This would seem to be the contract that initiated Brandis’ wartime production of sextants, and if what is reported in Jewelers’ Circular-Weekly was fairly recent news, then production of sextants by Brandis for the Navy began no earlier than October, 1917.  I note that this article appears to have imprecisely stated the Brandis firm name, and so here we’ve missed an opportunity to better define the date of the firm name transition from the ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.’ to ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc.’, which is an important element in the Brandis serial number chronology.

Jewelers' Circular-Weekly, October 10, 1917

The Brandis advertisement in the December, 1919 issue of The Rudder, which was mentioned in the previous post, provides additional details about Brandis’ activities during the period in question.  Here it is stated: “Each sextant has our guarantee to pass inspection at the U.S. Naval Observatory as did the 2400 furnished by us to the US Navy Department during the period of the war”.  The key things we learn here are that Brandis produced a total of 2400 sextants for the Navy during the war, and that Brandis finished manufacturing these 2400 sextants before December of 1919, by which time it was once again making sextants for the civilian market (hence the need for an advertisement in The Rudder).

Finally, a publication called The Marine Review, in its February, 1920 issue (4), contains a brief piece that I suspect relies heavily on information provided by Brandis.  The third paragraph of this article provides several relevant pieces of information:

 “The company draws attention to the fact that its entire plant was devoted to the manufacture of sextants during the war, the whole output going to the United States Navy.  Prior to the war, the output of American made sextants never exceeded 200 yearly.  With the entrance of the United States into the war and the resulting upbuilding of an American Merchant Marine, sextant manufacturers expanded their facilities to meet the increased demand.  In less than two years, the Brandis company delivered 2400 sextants to the United States Navy”. 

Here again is the statement that Brandis produced a total of 2400 sextants for the U.S. Navy during the war, and we are also told that Brandis completed this work in less than two years, a time interval which is consistent with what the previous two sources suggest, that production of sextants for the Navy started no earlier than October of 1917, and was completed before December, 1919.

Marine Review, February, 1920

The Marine Review also tells us that the only type of instrument Brandis manufactured while fulfilling its Navy contracts were sextants, all of which went to the Navy.  This implies that the Brandis serial number series should have increased by about 2400 between 1917 and 1919, and that all of the Brandis sextants made during this period were marked with Naval Observatory serial numbers.  This is pretty much what we see in the Brandis serial number chronology: Brandis was making sextants with serial numbers in the 3200-3300 range in 1917, and sextants with Brandis serial numbers in the 5600-5700 range could well have been made in 1919.  Additionally, an examination of the Tighar sextant number list reveals that all of the 48 Brandis sextants with serial numbers from 3243 to 5628 do in fact have Naval Observatory numbers (5,6). 

It isn’t possible with the available information to give precise serial numbers or dates for the beginning or end of Brandis’s production of the 2400 sextants for the Navy, and while the Marine Review article indicates that during the war Brandis’s entire factory was dedicated to producing sextants for the Navy, it appears that there wasn’t a sharp transition from making sextants for the Navy to making instruments for other customers at the end this production period.  This can be seen in the table below, which indicates the Naval Observatory serial numbers (if any) of the sextants with the five highest Brandis serial numbers of any that have come to light.  The second sextant listed, Brandis #5687, does not have a Naval Observatory serial number, while the next two sextants, Brandis #5760 and Brandis #5851, do have Naval Observatory numbers.  If the Naval Observatory serial number of the latter two sextants were higher than any made before them, one might reasonably think that they were produced after the war under a separate postwar Navy contract.  But Brandis #5851 has a Naval Observatory serial number 1110, which is lower than all but a few of the Brandis sextants on Tighar’s sextant list, thus it is reasonable to assume that this sextant was part of the wartime run of 2400 sextants made for the Navy.  We should probably also consider it possible that the outset of Brandis’ work for the Navy did not involve a distinct transition from civilian to Navy work.

The information provided by these various publications nicely jibes with the timing and magnitude of the increase in the production of Brandis instruments indicated by Brandis serial number chronology over the 1917-1919 period, and so provides independent corroboration of the accuracy of this portion of the Brandis serial number chronology. 

This additional information is also helpful in somewhat narrowing the estimated date of manufacture of the hypothetical Brandis #3500/USNO#1542 sextant.  As discussed in the previous post, the sextant with Brandis serial number 3243 is marked ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.’, while the sextant with Brandis serial number 3331 is marked ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc.’  Since this firm name change occurred sometime between July and December of 1917, some or all of the instruments with Brandis serial numbers between 3243 and 3331 must have been made in the second half of 1917.  Brandis was awarded its first contract to produce sextants for the Navy before October 10, 1917; the sextant with Brandis serial number 3243 doesn’t have a Naval Observatory serial number, and thus was made either before Brandis began producing sextants for this contract, or before Brandis dedicated its entire manufacturing capacity to producing sextants for the U.S. Navy.  The sextant with Brandis serial number 3331 does have a Naval Observatory serial number (USNO #1421), and would have been made early in Brandis’s production run of 2400 sextants for the Navy.  I think it is reasonable to assume that Brandis started dedicated production of those 2400 sextants no more than two or three months after the first contract award, and given that Brandis produced an average of 200 sextants per month while fulfilling its Navy contracts, it seems reasonable to think that the hypothetical Brandis #3500/USNO #1542 sextant was made within a month or two of the start of dedicated production of sextants for the Navy.  Thus, I think the most likely date of manufacture of this sextant would have been between one and five months of the award of its first Navy contract, i.e., sometime between November, 1917 and March, 1918.

The sextant with Brandis serial number 3331 would seem to be one of the early sextants made for the Navy’s first order of 1000 sextants.  Given the relatively low rate of production of instruments by Brandis prior to the war, it seems likely that by the time Brandis issued serial number 3500, its manufacturing plant had reached the point of dedicated production of sextants for the Navy.  Thus, besides leading to a somewhat narrow date range for the manufacture of the hypothetical Brandis #3500/USNO#1542 sextant, the information presented tells us that Brandis serial number 3500 was probably issued to a sextant rather than any other type of instrument Brandis manufactured, such as a surveyor’s level.  In this post and in others, I’ve referred to ‘the hypothetical Brandis #3500/USNO #1542 sextant’, but it seems likely that Brandis serial number 3500 was assigned to a sextant, so what unclear is whether the Naval Observatory assigned their serial number 1542 to the Brandis #3500 sextant. 

Readers may have expected me to also present a Naval Observatory serial number chronology to complement the Brandis serial chronology.  It would be nice to have this additional dating tool, but developing a Naval Observatory serial number chronology would seem to be a difficult endeavor.  One might construct such a chronology by searching for Naval Observatory inspection certificates with pre-World War I inspection dates, but no such inspection certificates have yet come to light, and I think the chances of finding any are fairly slim.  Judging by Tighar’s sextant number list, there are few pre-World War I U.S. Navy sextants to be found; this is probably because the Navy did not purchase sextants in large numbers prior to World War I (7).  Sextants were often re-inspected at the Naval Observatory once in service (8), and therefore if and when additional pre-war Navy sextant boxes come to light, there is a good chance that the inspection certificates they contain, if any, will indicate the dates of later re-inspections; I say ‘if any’ because it isn’t unusual for the inspection certificates to be missing from Navy sextant boxes of this era.  Also, while the research I’ve done so far indicates that the Naval Observatory started using serial numbers in the 1880s, I am not sure that the Naval Observatory serial numbers were consistently assigned to sextants prior to World War I; but this is subject that I’ll leave for another post.

Finally, many familiar with Tighar’s sextant number list have commented on the absence of an obvious relationship between Brandis and Naval Observatory serial numbers.  The absence of a correlation between these two sets of serial numbers suggests that the Naval Observatory made no effort to inspect sextants and assign Naval Observatory serial numbers to them in order of their manufacturer’s serial number, at least not during the 1917-1919 period.  I speculate that at this time the Naval Observatory’s storage area for sextants often contained many hundreds of newly-manufactured, yet-to-be-inspected,  Brandis, Keuffel & Esser, and Huff & Huff sextants, which were not carefully stored with regard to manufacturer’s serial number; batches of sextants would be retrieved from storage for inspection based on accessibility rather than with regard to manufacturer’s serial number (or even manufacturer), thus precluding a predictable relationship between sextant manufacturer serial numbers and Naval Observatory serial numbers.  An additional factor contributing to the lack of a correlation is that while the bulk of the Naval Observatory’s serial numbers appear to have been assigned to sextants, at least some Naval Observatory serial numbers were assigned to  instruments besides sextants, for instance timepieces, which also tended to reduce the correlation between Naval Observatory and manufacturer’s serial numbers.  More can be said about the subject of Naval Observatory serial numbers, but this is perhaps should be discussed another time.

Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are always welcome (no one will be banned, blocked, or castigated for offering differing opinions).  Send to gardnersghost@gmail.com 
~~~~
 Footnotes
(1) USNO Annual Reports can be downloaded at hathitrust.org.  Sextants were inspected prior to going into Navy service, and the term ‘new sextant’ in this context refers to sextants receiving their first inspection at the Naval Observatory; many, if not most, sextants were re-inspected once in service; see footnote 8.
(2) http://tighar.org/wiki/Sextant_box_found_on_Nikumaroro
(3) The Jewelers’ Circular-Weekly, Volume 75, Issue 1, page 59.  Jewelers’ Circular Publishing Co., October 10, 1917.  This can be found online at Google Books.
(4) Marine Review, Volume 50,  February, 1920, page 127.  Penton Publishing Company.  This can be found online at Google Books.
(5) The sextant with Brandis serial number 3243 seems to have been inadvertently left off the Tighar sextant number list, or deleted from it.
(6) In addition these 48 sextants, the Tighar sextant number list includes five Brandis sextants whose serial numbers are known only from markings on their sextant boxes; since the Naval Observatory didn’t consistently mark boxes of inspected sextants with USNO serial numbers, it is not known whether the sextants these five boxes once stored were had USNO serial numbers.  Tighar lists a sixth sextant in this range, Brandis #3702, as having no USNO serial number, but the discussion here: http://tighar.org/smf/index.php/topic,183.msg1696/topicseen.html#msg1696  indicates that this sextant has an illegible USNO serial number.
 (7) Only 25 new sextants were inspected at the Naval Observatory in each of fiscal years 1916 and 1917; several earlier USNO Annual Reports I have had access to indicate similarly small numbers of new sextants inspected or purchased.  Note also that the Marine Review article states “Prior to the war, the output of American made sextants never exceeded 200 yearly”; presumably many of these “200 yearly” sextants were sold to civilian customers rather than to the U.S. Navy.
(8)  This can be seen by the many examples of U.S. Navy sextant boxes on the Tighar sextant number list containing inspection certificates that are dated many years after Brandis’ demise; also, sextant boxes containing two differently dated inspection certificates have come to light.

What do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Two

In my first post on topic of the Nikumaroro sextant box numbers, I showed that a good argument can be made that the two numbers the sextant box were marked with, 3500 and 1542, are the respective Brandis and U.S. Naval Observatory serial numbers of the sextant this box once held.  In this post, I will use a few basic assumptions and various kinds of evidence to arrive at a manufacture date for the hypothetical Brandis sextant #3500.  This manufacture date will provide a test of the hypothesis that the Nikumaroro sextant box was made to hold a Brandis sextant: for this to be true, the sextant would have to have been made sometime before the sextant box was found in Nikumaroro in 1939.  The manufacture date also will provide a test of Tighar’s hypothesis that the sextant box arrived at Nikumaroro in Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra: for that to be true, the sextant would have had to have been manufactured sometime before Earhart’s ill-fated 1937 flight.  If the arrived-at manufacture date precedes both of these events, this fact alone would not make these hypotheses true, it would simply indicate that they are plausible.  Other ideas have been put forward about what the Nikumaroro sextant box was and how it arrived at Nikumaroro, and they may also be consistent with the arrived-at manufacture date. 

Collectors of antique precision instruments made by certain companies have at their disposal serial number chronologies that make it possible to determine the date of manufacture of an instrument by its serial number (1).  Unfortunately, a Brandis serial number chronology does not seem to exist, so here I will develop one that provides sufficient detail to place fairly narrow limits on when Brandis manufactured the instrument they assigned serial number 3500 to.  Two general assumptions are needed to develop this chronology.  The first is that Brandis used a single serial number series to identify the various kinds of instruments it made, as was the case for a number of other precision instrument manufacturing companies.  The other is that higher Brandis serial numbers indicate later dates of manufacture; perhaps at a short enough time scale (e.g., days or weeks), this assumption doesn’t apply, but I find it reasonable to think it holds well enough to narrow down an instrument’s manufacture date to within a 1-year time period, and that is sufficient for our purposes here.

The approach I will take here is to establish reference points in the Brandis serial number chronology by identifying the dates of manufacture of a number of reference instruments whose Brandis serial numbers are known; if the above two general assumptions are valid, then instruments whose Brandis serial numbers fall between those of any two reference instruments will have been made sometime between the manufacture dates of those two reference instruments.  Since we only really care about when the hypothetical Brandis #3500 sextant was made, it would be sufficient to identify two reference points that reasonably well constrain its date of manufacture, but I will present a considerably longer chronology, if only to show that various sources of information I’ve found, and the assumptions I’ve made, come together to form a self-consistent Brandis serial number chronology.

The first reference point in the Brandis serial number chronology is provided by a type of land surveying instrument called a transit that had Brandis serial number 1659, and that belonged to the Department of Parks of the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City.  In 1899, this transit was sent to Brandis for repair; a dated bill for this repair (2) is shown below .  The billing date, September 18, 1899, provides a ‘no later than’ date for the manufacture of this instrument; we don’t know when it was made, but we can be sure that it was made before September 18, 1899.

Photo Courtesy of The Biggert Collection of Architectural Vignettes on Commercial Stationery,
Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University. 

 A sextant with Brandis serial number 1794 is listed among the items that were displayed at the Paris International Exposition of 1900, held from April to November of 1900 (3).  It is reasonable to think that Brandis supplied a recently-made sextant to this exposition, and therefore that this sextant was made in 1899 or early 1900.

A sextant with Brandis serial number 2763 and U.S. Naval Observatory serial number 348 was sold on eBay several years ago (see supporting materials page).  The label on the interior of this sextant’s box is hard to read in the pictures posted on eBay, but according to the seller, the label indicates that the sextant was ordered from Brandis in March of 1911 and delivered to the purchaser on May of the same year; it is reasonable to think this sextant was made in 1911.

The Surveying Antiques web site displays a photo of a case label for a Brandis level (4), a type of surveying instrument, whose Brandis serial number was 2928.  The case label indicates that this level was ordered from Brandis on May 13, 1915 and delivered to the purchaser on June 5, 1915; it is reasonable to think this instrument was made in 1915.

Case Label, Brandis Level # 2928 (Survey Antiques web site)

An article in a 1919 issue of Popular Astronomy (5) presents the findings of a party of U.S. Naval Observatory astronomers who observed a solar eclipse at Mt. Baker, Oregon in June of 1918.  The article mentions that the Naval Observatory astronomers had with them a sextant with Brandis serial number 3257; this instrument must have been made some time before  June, 1918.

Mount Baker Eclipse Party Article, 1919

 So far, dates of manufacture have been established for five Brandis instruments.  The dates of manufacture of the middle three instruments are well-constrained, i.e., the date range specified is pretty narrow, and it’s hard to believe an of them could be off by more than a year.  The ‘no later than’ dates for the first and fifth instruments are less exact, but they nevertheless fit in with the manufacture dates of the middle three instruments, i.e., the ‘no later than’ date for Brandis transit #1659 pre-dates the manufacture date for Brandis sextant #1794, and the ‘no later than’ date for Brandis sextant #3257 post-dates the manufacture date of Brandis level #2928.  So far, we have a self-consistent Brandis serial number chronology with five reasonably well-established time points, but we’re still short of the serial number we are really interested in — Brandis #3500.

To extend the chronology to higher serial numbers, dates of manufacture will be attached to several sextants based on the fact that Brandis changed its name several times during the course of its existence.  A web page of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (6) provides the following brief history of the instrument maker F. E. Brandis and his company:

“Frederick Ernest Brandis (1845–1916) was born in Germany, came to the United States in 1858, worked for Stackpole & Brother for a few years, and opened his own instrument shop in 1871. The firm became F. Brandis & Co. in 1875, F. E. Brandis, Sons & Co. in 1890, and Brandis & Sons, Inc. in 1916. The Pioneer Instrument Company purchased control of the Brandis firm in 1922, and was in turn acquired by the Bendix Aviation Corporation in 1928. The manufacture of Brandis instruments ceased in 1932.
Ref: Charles E. Smart, The Makers of Surveying Instruments in America Since 1700 (Troy, N.Y., 1962), p. 14-15.”

Brandis stamped its name into the instruments it manufactured, and it is reasonable to assume that the wording of the firm name Brandis stamped into its instruments changed whenever the wording of the Brandis firm name did.  The Smithsonian has used Brandis firm names to estimate the dates of manufacture of instruments in its collection, and I will use this approach as well.  Based on the Charles Smart book that the Smithsonian cites, one would assume that an instrument marked “F. Brandis & Co.” was made no later than 1890, an instrument marked “F. E. Brandis, Sons & Co” was made between 1890 and 1916, and an instrument marked “Brandis & Sons, Inc.” was made in 1916 or later.  I think the Charles Smart book may be wrong about certain aspects of the history of Brandis firm name changes, however, so I will used a somewhat different history of Brandis firm name changes to estimate dates of manufacture of Brandis instruments.  My revisions are pretty minor though, so if Charles Smart has it right and I’ve got it wrong, I’m not introducing any serious errors into the Brandis serial number chronology by using my revised history rather than Charles Smart’s.

In searching through descriptions and photos of Brandis instruments in museum collections, auction houses, eBay, and other sources to determine the specific wording of their Brandis firm name markings, I’ve found four instruments that are marked ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.’,  a version of the Brandis firm name that the Charles Smart book doesn’t mention (7).  The Brandis level bearing serial number 2928 that was discussed above is one of these four instruments, as its case label indicates .  The other three instruments, all sextants, have the next three highest Brandis serial numbers — 3193, 3239, and 3243 — whose Brandis name markings I’ve been able to read (see the supporting materials page).  The Brandis serial numbers of this group of four instruments are bracketed by the Brandis #2763 discussed above, which is marked ‘FE Brandis, Sons & Co.’, and a sextant with Brandis serial number 3331, which is marked ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc.’ (see photo below).  Thus it appears that there was a period when Brandis was called ‘Brandis and Sons Manufacturing Company’, and that this period came after the ‘FE Brandis & Sons & Company’ era, and before the ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc’ era.

When did these firm name changes occur?  The change from ‘FE Brandis & Sons & Co.’ to ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.’ must have occurred between 1912 and 1914, because the 1912 edition of the Brooklyn City Directory (8) has Brandis listed as ‘Brandis, FE & Sons & Co Engineering Insts’, while The Handbook of Construction Plants, its Cost and Efficiency Cost, published in 1914 (9), has Brandis listed as ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co. Brooklyn, N.Y.’.  As for the name change from ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co’ to ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc.’, the Charles Smart book gives 1916 as the year that ‘Brandis & Sons, Incorporated’ came into existence, however, in an advertisement in the June 28, 1917 issue of a journal called Engineering News - Record (10) gives the Brandis firm name as 'Brandis & Sons Mfg Company', so it appears that the change to Brandis & Sons, Inc. occurred no earlier than July, 1917.  But the name change occurred before the end of 1917, because an advertisement in the December, 1919 issue of a boating magazine called The Rudder (11) contains an advertisement for Brandis sextants (see below) that includes the words “Incorporated 1917” near the bottom of the advertisement.  It may seem imprudent to prefer information provided by these advertisements to the Charles Smart book, but since Smart’s book missed the ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.’ era, I will rely on what the two Brandis advertisements suggest and assume that instruments marked 'Brandis & Sons, Inc' were made no earlier than July, 1917.

Engineering News-Record, June 28, 1917; page 140. (Google Books)

The Rudder, December 1919. (Google Books)

The sextants with Brandis serial numbers 3193, 3239, and 3243 must have made sometime between 1915 and 1917, because they have higher, and thus later, serial numbers than the Brandis level # 2928 that was made in 1915, and they bear the ‘Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.’ firm name, and thus were made before the end 1917, the latest date at which the firm name could have changed to ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc’.

The final time point that I can establish for an instrument with a serial number less than 3500 is provided by a sextant with Brandis serial number 3331 which bears the ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc.’ firm name, and thus could have been made no earlier than July, 1917; this sextant has the lowest Brandis serial number of any instrument I know of bearing this firm name marking (12).  I should say that not every sextant I’ve seen with a Brandis serial number higher than 3331 is marked ‘Brandis & Sons, Inc.’; some are instead marked ‘Brandis and Sons', but the two markings are intermixed with respect to serial number as far as I can tell so I think the latter name marking is simply a shortened version of the former

Brandis Sextant #3331, Brandis & Sons, Inc.  (Land & Sea Collection web site)

The Brandis serial number chronology can be further extended thanks to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s role in the early decades of the 20th century as what we would now call a quality assurance laboratory for the U.S. Navy.  As discussed in Part One of this series of posts on the Nikumaroro sextant box numbers, newly purchased U. S. Navy. sextants were inspected for suitability at the Naval Observatory before they were put into service.  Due to slight manufacturing imperfections, angles measured with many sextants deviate from true angles by small but navigationally significant amounts.  These deviations must be corrected for in order to obtain the most accurate results, therefore part of the Naval Observatory’s inspection process involved determining the necessary corrections.  Attached to the inside of a sextant’s box was an Naval Observatory inspection certificate that listed these corrections for several different angles (see photo below); the inspection certificate also provided spaces to indicate the sextant’s Naval Observatory serial number, the sextant manufacturer’s name and serial number, and the inspection date, although sometimes not all this information would actually be filled in on the certificate.  The inspection date is the key piece of information for our purposes because it provides us with a ‘no later than’ date; the sextant’s manufacture date must have preceded its inspection date (13).

A Naval Observatory Inspection Certificate (from Collectors Weekly web site)

Three Brandis sextants that have survived to the present time have inspection certificates that provide useful time points for the Brandis serial number chronology.  Two of them are standard maritime sextants that were modified into Byrd bubble sextants for use by a group of three U.S. Navy-Curtiss (NC) flying boats that in 1919 attempted to make the first successful flight across the Atlantic Ocean (14); only one flying boat made it all the way across.  One of these two sextants is in the navigational instrument collection of the Smithsonian Institution (15); its Brandis serial number is 5296, USNO serial number 2977, and its inspection certificate is dated March 16, 1919.  The other sextant, which is privately owned (16), has Brandis serial number 5292, USNO serial number 2975, and its inspection certificate is dated March 26, 1919 (the certificate for this sextant is the one shown above).  The third sextant is another instrument in the Smithsonian’s navigational instrument collection; its Brandis serial number is #5620, its USNO serial number is 2939, and its inspection certificate has a 1919 date, but the day and month are not provided by the Smithsonian (17).  The Brandis serial number series appears to have increased far more rapidly between 1917 and 1919 than it did in prior years, and one might speculate that the entry of the United States into World War I in 1917 had something to do with the apparent increase in output of instruments by Brandis; I'll have more to say about this in future posts.

Navy-Curtiss Seaplane NC-4, sometime after the 1919 Translatlantic Flight (U.S. Navy Photo)

I know of only four Brandis instruments with serial numbers higher than 5620, and none of them provide time points that extend the chronology to higher serial numbers.  At the date of this post, Tighar’s sextant list (18) includes over sixty Brandis sextants, only four of which have Brandis serial numbers greater than 5620.  This statistic suggests to me that the four-digit Brandis serial number series ended in the vicinity of Brandis serial number #5953, the highest Brandis serial number that has come to light.

The table below brings together the Brandis serial numbers and manufacture dates of all the instruments that provide useful time points for the Brandis serial number chronology.  Brandis #3500 is placed where it fits in the table, and so I finally arrive at the point that I’ve been laboring toward: according to the chronology developed here: the instrument assigned Brandis serial number 3500 was made sometime between July, 1917 and March, 1919.  From the point of view of when the hypothesized Brandis #3500 sextant would have been made, the hypotheses that the Nikumaroro sextant box once held a Brandis sextant made for the U. S. Navy, and that it arrived on Nikumaroro in Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra, are both reasonable ones.  Of course, alternate hypotheses about what the sextant box is, and how it arrived on Nikumaroro, may also be consistent with this manufacture date.  For instance, some have suggested that the Nikumaroro sextant box came from the freighter Norwich City, which ran aground on Nikumaroro in 1929 (19).  This idea is also consistent with the arrived-at manufacture date, since there would have been 10 to 12 years for the sextant box to make it to the ship’s officer who used it on the Norwich City.

I have additional information that provides a somewhat narrower estimate for when the hypothetical  Brandis #3500/USNO #1542 sextant was made and that provides a check on the Brandis serial number chronology developed here.  However, it would require several more pages to discuss this additional information, and since this has already been a long post I will save that discussion for another day.

Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are always welcome (no one will be banned, blocked, or castigated for offering differing opinions).  Send to gardnersghost@gmail.com 
~~~~
 Footnotes:

 (1)  http://www.surveyantiques.com/keuffel-esser-dating.htm
or: http://www.surveyantiques.com/dating-your-instrument.htm

 (2)  https://biggert.cul.columbia.edu/items/view/ave_biggert_00851

 (3) The Report of the Commissioner-General for the United States to the International Universal Exposition, Paris, 1900. Volume III, page 255.  Washington, Government Printing Office, 1901.  Available online at Google Books.

(4) http://www.surveyantiques.com/image-viewer.htm?old_case_tags/Brandis/Brandis_Sons.JPG

(5) Popular Astronomy, Volume 27, page 359-365; 1919 (month not known).  Accessed at the SAO /NASA Astrophysics Data System: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1919PA.....27..359W

(6) Smithsonian: [http://amhistory.si.edu/navigation/maker.cfm?makerid=35] 

(7)  I’m assuming that the quote above from the Smithsonian is a correct reading of Smart’s book, which I don’t have access to.

(8) The Brooklyn City Directory, Volume LXXXVIII, 1912.  Published by The Brooklyn City Directory Co, 1912.  Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2013.   https://ia801702.us.archive.org/26/items/brooklynnewyorkc00broo/brooklynnewyorkc00broo.pdf

(9) The Handbook of Construction Plants, its Cost and Efficiency Cost, Richard T. Dana.  Myron C. Clark Publishing Co., Chicago. 1914.  Published in 2013 by Forgotten Books, www.ForgottenBooks.org

(10) Engineering News-Record, June 28, 1917; page 140. Accessed at:
https://books.google.com/books?id=e8xJAQAAIAAJ&pg=RA3-PA140&lpg=RA3-PA140&dq=brandis+surveying+instrument&source=bl&ots=apd2j4vz_6&sig=HyJs0XUsIMRxf0YljyBOqj_8YKU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qFofVe_OGoLUsAWQ44H4Cg&ved=0CEsQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=brandis%20surveying%20instrument&f=false

(11) The Rudder, December, 1917.  Accessed at: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015022693488;seq=644;size=150;view=image

(12) http://landandseacollection.com/id858.html

(13) At least some sextants were re-inspected once in service, as proven by examples of sextant boxes with two inspection certificates.  The certificate doesn’t tell us how much time elapsed between the sextant’s manufacture and its first inspection at the Naval Observatory, or whether this was the sextant’s first inspection, thus all it provides us with is a ‘no later than’ date for when the sextant was manufactured and  assigned its Brandis serial number.

(14)  http://airandspace.si.edu/collections/artifact.cfm?object=nasm_A19270032000

(15) http://amhistory.si.edu/navigation/object.cfm?recordnumber=451576

(16) http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/55412-byrd-bubble-sextant.  
(http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/55412-byrd-bubble-sextant)

(17) http://amhistory.si.edu/navigation/object.cfm?recordnumber=1058766

(18) http://tighar.org/wiki/Sextant_box_found_on_Nikumaroro

(19) http://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/ResearchPapers/WreckNorwichCity.html