As mentioned at the end of Part I, on a visit to the National Archives in Washington D.C., in search of a link between the Nikumaroro sextant box and the USS Bushnell, I found a series of documents [1] that proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Brandis and Sons had indeed made high grade sextants #3125 and #3142 for Thomas Medinger. The earliest document was a typed copy of a letter dated February 24, 1917 from Thomas Medinger to Brandis and Sons [2]:
Feb 24-1917
Dear sir:—
Confirming phone conversation I hereby request you to make for me fifty (50) of your best sextants with my name engraved on same. Delivery of these sextants, carefully packed in packing cases on June 1-1917.
I enclose you my check for one-thousand dollars on account. Please acknowledge receipt of check and order and oblige.
Yours very truly,
Thos. G. Medinger
We also have on hand 35 High grade Sextants, ordered by Thos. Medinger, New York, which order was placed before we secured any Government contracts. These sextants are almost completed, but work was stopped on them to concentrate on Government work. Twenty seven of these sextants could be shipped at once (this includes 10, of which Commander Parker perhaps has written you). The remaining 8 are completed except for object glasses and eyepieces for the telescopes. These glasses are on order with Kollmorgon Optical Corp., Brooklyn, N.Y., who, after our repeated endeavours to obtain deliveries, now make no promises.
F. E. Brandis Son & Co.,
754 Lexington Ave.,
Brooklyn, New York.
February 5, 1918
Dear Sirs:—
Referring to your letter of February 1st in which you state that you have 10 35 high grade sextants made for another firm.
We are taking steps to secure these for the Government if your bill is for a satisfactory price.
Please do not let these sextants leave your custody until you have been communicated with by the Navy Department concerning them.
Very respectfully,
T.B. Howard
Rear Admiral, U.S.N. , Ret.,
Superintendent.
TELEGRAM
February 8
Brandis & Sons,
754 Lexington Ave., Brooklyn, New York. Navy is requisitioning 35 sextants manufactured by you for Medinger. Complete sextants and hold pending further instructions.
NAVAL OBSERVATORY
Feb. 20, 1918
Mr. Thos. G. Medinger
16 Beaver Street
New York, N.Y.
Dear sir:-
This is to advise you that the U.S. Government has requisitioned the sextants which we had almost completed under your order dated Feb. 24/17.
As you of course understand this leaves us no alternative but either refill your order as soon as possible or to refund you $1350 which is the balance still due you on your advance payment.
Please write advising us of your wishes in this matter.
Brandis may have expected an understanding reply from Thomas Medinger but what it got instead was a sternly worded letter from Medinger’s attorney:
March 4, 1918.
Brandis & Sons Mfg. Co.,
754 Lexington Ave.,
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Gentlemen:-
My Client Mr. Thos. G. Medinger, of No. 16 Beaver Str., New York City, has this day placed before me all the correspondence and matters relating to his order for fifty (50) Sextants, of which fifteen (15) were already delivered by you and fully paid for.
With regard to the balance, you are advised that Mr. Medinger shall hold you for the loss sustained by him by reason of your breach of contract in failing to make deliveries of this merchandise for the cost of market value thereof between the price agreed upon between you and that for which the merchandise is salable today, aggregating a total of $2450, in addition to the deposit on hand with you on account of these orders making a total of $3800.00
I shall be pleased to receive your check for this amount, otherwise litigation will have to ensue for the damage suffered by Mr. Medinger in accordance with conditions above indicated.
Yours very truly,
R.L. Cherurg.
Brandis forwarded the letter from Medinger’s attorney to the Naval Observatory, noting that it had shipped the sextants to the Naval Observatory with the understanding that the government would protect it from any legal action by Medinger. This prompted a series of exchanges between Brandis, the Naval Observatory, and two other branches of the U.S. Navy that had roles in acquisition of U.S. Navy equipment, the Bureau of Supplies & Accounts, and the Bureau of Navigation. There were questions about whether a contract between Brandis and Medinger had existed, what payments Brandis had received from Medinger, why Brandis was charging the Navy a few dollars more per sextant than it had charged Medinger, and whether there was a legal basis for the government to intervene on Brandis’s behalf. At one point in late March, Supplies and Accounts sent a letter to Brandis stating that Brandis had never been obligated to send the sextants to the Navy and therefore the government could not intervene in the threatened lawsuit. This led Navigation to send a letter to Supplies and Accounts stating that Navigation’s dealings with Brandis essentially amounted to a commandeering of the Medinger sextants, giving Brandis no choice but to deliver the Medinger sextants to the Navy, and therefore the government was obligated to intervene on Brandis’s behalf. On April 22, 1918, Supplies and Accounts sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Justice asking it to intervene on Brandis’ behalf.
If the wheels of the Justice Department moved at all in the matter of the Medinger sextants, they moved slowly. A letter dated July 29, 1918, from the Naval Observatory to Supplies and Accounts states that Brandis was holding the ten Medinger sextants still in its possession (one of the 26 sextants in the February 20th shipment must have failed inspection and been returned), having been advised by their attorney to not voluntarily release them unless protected from further damage claims from Medinger. The letter emphasizes that the ten sextants were urgently needed and requests that Supplies & Accounts “take such action as may be necessary to insure their immediate delivery to the Naval Observatory while at the same time protecting the contractor against further damage claims resulting from such delivery”. A few days later, Supplies & Accounts sent Brandis the letter below ordering it to deliver the remaining sextants:
NAVY DEPARTMENT
BUREAU OF SUPPLIES AND ACCOUNTS
WASHINGTON, D.C.
2 August 1918.
Brandis & Sons,
754 Lexington Ave.,
Brooklyn, N.Y.
SUBJECT: Contract 4380-1918 — Sextants.
Sirs:
You are directed to make shipment of the remaining ten sextants, covered by contract 4380, immediately. Information is at hand that the delivery of these sextants has been delayed pending the outcome of litigation involving the 25 sextants delivered under said contract.
You are informed that contract 4380, covering the 35 sextants is of a commandeering nature in which the question of the term of delivery is not optional with you. This order was placed in persuance to the provisions of the Acts of Congress — Navy Appropriations Act, approved 4 March 1917 and the Urgent Deficiencies Act, approved 15 June 1917, which acts authorize the President, through the head of any Department, to place an order with any person for such products or material as may be required. The compliance with this order and all others placed by reason of the above mentioned acts, is obligatory and takes precedence over all other orders and contracts theretofore placed with you.
In view of the foregoing you are advised to make immediate shipment of these ten sextants. You are requested to inform as to the date of the shipment.
Brandis shipped the last of the sextants originally intended for Thomas Medinger to the Naval Observatory on the day it received this letter. A letter notifying the Naval Observatory of the shipment includes the serial numbers of shipped sextants:
Aug. 5, 1918.
Superintendent,
Naval Observatory,
Washington, D.C.
Dear Sir:—
A letter received from the Bureau of Supplies & Accounts this day instructs us to ship at once the ten remaining sextants due on Contract #4380.
Obeying these instructions, we are today forwarding to you by express, ten High Grade Sextants, Nos. 3121, 3130, 3132, 3133, 3137, 3143, 3147, 3159, 3162, 3165.
Respectfully Yours,
Brandis & Sons, Inc.
John Neilson, Treas.
Medinger #3125 and #3142 are not among the ten sextants sent in this shipment, but the proximity of the serial numbers listed in the letter eliminates any reasonable doubt that they were made by Brandis and Sons. Medinger #3125 and #3142 were likely among the 26 sextants Brandis shipped to the Naval Observatory on February 20, 1918; I didn’t find a memo listing the serial numbers of the sextants in that earlier shipment. Note that 26 sextants were in the February 20th shipment and 10 more in the August 5th shipment. 35 Medinger sextants were at the Brandis factory in February 1918 and the two shipments total 36 sextants and so I presume that one of the sextants in the February shipment was rejected upon inspection at the Naval Observatory and replaced with one of the ten sextants in the August shipment.
It was an unexpected bonus that in my time spent at the National Archives I not only found documents proving that the Nikumaroro sextant box came from the USS Bushnell, I also found documents proving that Brandis and Sons made the Medinger sextants. But while the mystery of the Medinger sextants was solved, these documents raised questions about what was going on in the mind of Thomas Medinger to which I can only provide speculative answers.
Thomas Medinger was in the nautical instrument business, so he must have known of U.S. Navy’s urgent wartime need for nautical instruments. Why didn’t he feel a patriotic obligation to take Brandis’s reimbursement for the undelivered sextants if he wasn’t willing to wait for Brandis to complete his order? Medinger didn’t dispute that Brandis was obligated to turn the sextants over to the Navy, so why did he hold Brandis liable for the profits he claimed to have missed out on?
Could Medinger’s missed profits really have been as large as claimed? His advanced payments to Brandis totaled $3,000 and he received 15 of the 50 sextants he had ordered, so Brandis’ offer to refund him $1350 indicates that Brandis charged Medinger $110 per sextant ($3,000-$1350 = $1650; $1650/15= $110). Medinger’s claim that his potential profit on the 35 undelivered sextants was $2,450, comes out to a profit of $70 per sextant ($2450/35 = $70). To make $70 per sextant he would have had to sell them for $180 each ($110 + $70), which is a lot more than the usual price that high grade sextants went for. In Brandis Catalog #20, published in 1915 or 1916 [4], the price of high grade sextants is listed as $130. Two of Brandis’ competitors, Keuffel & Esser and Buff & Buff, charged $120 for high grade sextants, according to their catalogs published in 1913 and 1916, respectively [5,6]. Brandis charged the U.S. Navy $112 for each of the commandeered Medinger sextants, two dollars more than it had charged Medinger (the extra two dollars was to cover the cost of an additional screwdriver supplied with each sextant sent to the Navy).
Did Thomas Medinger really have a customer (or customers) willing to pay $50 or $60 more than what high grade sextants typically sold for in the early 20th century? The size of Medinger’s order, 50 sextants, seemed rather large for a small nautical instrument dealer to have placed. I remembered a sentence in the article in the trade journal Marine Review that was mentioned in an earlier post [7]: “Prior to the war, the output of American made sextants never exceeded 200 yearly”. Thomas Medinger’s order was about a quarter of the number of sextants that, according to the Marine Review article, all U.S. instrument makers combined sold in a good year. I also knew from reading U.S. Naval Observatory’s Annual Reports that the U.S. Navy had purchased 25 new surveying sextants in fiscal year 1916 and 25 new high grade sextants in fiscal year 1917. Thomas Medinger’s small shop would be receiving twice as many sextants as the U.S. Navy acquired in each of these two years.
I suspect the answers many of these questions have to do with the shortage of nautical instruments mentioned earlier in this post. The situation at the time is discussed in the Professional Notes section of the January 1917 edition of the US Naval Institute Proceedings in a subsection titled ‘Scarcity of Nautical Instruments Causes Concern’ [8]; several excerpts appear below:
“In August, 1914, the war began and then England and France needed all the instruments they could manufacture for their home use. An embargo was placed on the exportation of chronometers, sextants, compasses, binnacles, barometers, marine glasses and all navigating instruments. The British authorities swept their country clean commandeering all they could find. Importers here have been unable to get any instruments and they have also been unable to obtain any parts of instruments which are imported for assembly in this country. Then the boom in shipbuilding came. Every shipyard is working to its full capacity in building vessels and still more are to be ordered and where the instruments are to come from for the navigation of these vessels no one knows”…“Compasses and sounding instruments can be supplied because there are several expert compass makers in this country and little difficulty, comparatively, is being experienced in obtaining the necessary materials for their construction, but there is an absolute famine of chronometers and sextants”
The New York City instrument dealer John Bliss, one of Thomas Medinger’s competitors, is quoted as follows:
“Keuffel and Esser and the Sperry Gyroscope Co., of New York, F. E. Brandis Sons and Co., of Brooklyn, and the Warner and Swazey Co., of Cleveland, are making sextants, but how or in what quantities I don't know. In normal times sextants cost from $60 to $ 150, but just now they will bring almost any price. The glasses used in these instruments are all made abroad, mostly in France, and none have been imported for a long time”
A section further along reads:
“It used to be possible to find second-hand sextants and other instruments in the ship chandleries, junk shops and pawnbrokers, but now not one is to be found in these places. The officers of Swedish and Norwegian vessels who have visited American ports in the past two years appreciated the serious condition and have gathered in every instrument they could find.”
I noted that the size of Thomas Medinger’s order, 50 sextants, seemed rather large. Perhaps he saw the nautical instrument shortage as an opportunity and ordered far more sextants than he would normally need to have in his shop, gambling that he’d be able to sell them at a steep profit. Medinger probably had found at least some customers willing to pay $180 for sextants that in normal times went for $120 or $130. If he hadn’t been able to sell the 15 high grade sextants that he received from Brandis for something in the ballpark of $180 each, the legal argument for $2450 in missed profits would have been pretty weak one had it been presented in court. Thomas Medinger must have thought he had customers willing to pay an inflated price for many if not all the remaining sextants on his order, otherwise he could have taken Brandis’s refund offer and not lost a penny.
Medinger’s business might have been struggling from a shortage of product to sell in his shop. It wasn’t just sextants that were in short supply, it was a range of nautical instruments, including chronometers, Thomas Medinger’s flagship product. But the case for holding Brandis liable for lost profits on the sextants that had been commandeered by the U.S. Navy seemed pretty weak in my completely inexpert legal opinion. It also seemed wrong from a basic ethical standpoint for Medinger to put his own personal financial gain over of the needs of his country in wartime. The picture of Thomas Medinger that developed in my mind, rightly or wrongly, was not a positive one. He struck me as an unreasonable person.
An armchair psychological argument could be made that Thomas Medinger’s personality had been hardened by terrible events in his family history. Thomas’s mother Mary and his brother Joseph, both suffered gruesome deaths. Mary’s death is described in graphic detail in the March 26, 1895, edition of the New York Times:
New York Times, March 26, 1895 | |
Thomas was in his early thirties at the time of his mother’s horrifying death by trolley. A lawsuit against the Brooklyn Heights Railroad Company resulted in a verdict for $7,500 in favor of the Medinger family. The Brooklyn Heights Railroad Company contested this judgment and an appellate court ruled that a new trial be held unless the Medingers agreed to a reduction of the judgement to $5,000. The stated rationale for this decision was that Mary Medinger was old and had no income of her own (she was a traditional nonworking housewife of the period). I was unable to find any later reporting about this legal case and so my guess is that the Medingers accepted the appeals court judgment.
Thomas’s brother Joseph, three years his elder, was one of the victims of the Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1876, which killed at least 278 people attending a performance of a play called The Two Orphans on the night of December 5, 1876 [9]. Over 100 of the fire’s victims could not be identified and were buried in a common grave in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Fatalities were primarily among audience members in the highest tier of the theatre, where the cheapest seats were located. This section quickly filled with a noxious smoke after the fire broke out. The only exit to the street was via two long stairways that quickly became jammed with people literally falling over one another trying to escape. Less than half of the people who had been sitting in the upper tier made it to safety.
 |
Brooklyn Eagle, December 6, 1875 |
Joseph Medinger was 17 or 18 years old at the time of his death in this fire. He had left home a year before his death and was apparently up to no good of some kind. His father Eugene had put a paid notice in the January 27, 1875, edition of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper disavowing responsibility for Joseph’s actions, whatever they were.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 27, 1875 |
As far as I know, Thomas’ brother John S. Medinger didn’t die in a terrible accident, but he was probably a source of anxiety to his father and siblings. A brief article in the September 21, 1900, edition of the Brooklyn Eagle reports that John Medinger had been arrested on two counts of petit larceny for passing bad checks to a Brooklyn saloonkeeper. The final paragraph of the article states that John was thought to be “suffering from some brain trouble” as a result of the circumstances of his mother’s death. An article in the Brooklyn Eagle a few days later indicates that this wasn’t John Medinger’s first brush with the law, and that he had been sentenced to serve a year in the county penitentiary for his current crimes. The article reports that John told the sentencing judge that his time in the penitentiary would allow him to “think over matters and realize what kind of life I have been living”. John Medinger’s time reflecting in the pen may not have had the desired effect. A short article in the January 19, 1903, edition of the Brooklyn Eagle reports that a John H. Medinger was sentenced to a year in prison for securing money under false pretenses. I suspect that “John H. Medinger” was in fact Thomas’ brother John A. Medinger, that the letter ‘H’ simply a typesetting error.
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 21, 1900 (right) and October 1, 1900 (left) | |
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 19, 1903 |
One final bit of fodder for armchair psychological analysis: according to various business directories and US Census records, between 1911 and 1920, Thomas and his family lived at four different addresses. In 1911 they lived at West 180th Street in Manhattan, in 1913 they lived a few blocks away at West 183rd Street; in 1915 they were living in Ridgewood New Jersey, and by 1920 they were once again living in Manhattan on West 87th Street. It’s tempting to see these frequent moves as a manifestation of the restive nature of the head of the household, Thomas Medinger.
Perhaps I should have ended this blog post with the documents proving that the Medinger sextants were made by Brandis and Sons. Readers may think that Thomas Medinger was perfectly justified in taking legal action against Brandis. While I’ve raised the possibility that the terrible events in Thomas Medinger’s family history darkened his psyche I’m not so sure I buy this idea, it’s perhaps too facile an explanation. What Thomas Medinger was like as a person is something I don’t really know, but I couldn’t help but to include this long digression about Thomas in this post. I noted earlier that I’ve passed by his old Beaver Street business address on countless occasions. For over thirty years I lived within a few blocks of the first two of his Manhattan home addresses, and I now live not too much farther from the third one. I’ve been walking in the ghostly footsteps of Thomas Medinger for much of my life, looking at many of the same buildings he saw, including the buildings in which he worked and lived. I feel a bit like a character out of an episode of the old TV program One Step Beyond (cue eerie music), mysteriously manipulated by a supernatural Thomas Medinger to re-air his century old grievance about not getting the rest of his Brandis sextant order.
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Thomas G. Medinger [10] |
Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are welcome. Send to gardnersghost@gmail.com
Footnotes/References
[1] Records Group 78, Records of the Naval Observatory. General Correspondence, 1909-25. 9:26001-9:29590 Box 46 PC-42, Entry 12. The documents are a mix of originals and typed copies of originals.
[2] Sharp-eyed readers may notice that in Medinger's letterhead he identifies himself as being a chronometer maker. I wrote in Part I that my guess was that Medinger was a dealer (retailer) of nautical instruments, not a maker of them. So there is some contradictory evidence about this, but I think Thomas Medinger was simply a dealer instruments, not a maker of them. I think Medinger's letterhead was simply a bit of puffery.
[3] The Ghost of Gardner Island. The Mystery of the RO Numbers
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-mystery-of-ro-numbers.html
[4] The Ghost of Gardner Island. A Brief Note on the Date of Publication of Brandis Catalogue No. 20
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2017/02/a-brief-note-on-date-of-publication-of.html
[5] Catalogue of Keuffel & Esser Company. 1913.
https://archive.org/details/CatalogueOfKeuffelAndEsserCo34Edition1913
[6] A Catalogue of Surveying Instruments. 1916. Buff & Buff Mfg. Co.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293108132717&seq=5
[7] The Ghost of Gardner Island. What Do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Three
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2015/04/what-do-numbers-3500-and-1542-tell-us.html
[8] US Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol 43. No.1, January 1917. U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Md. A section titled Navigation and Radio, subtitled Scarcity of Nautical Instruments Causes Concern. Page 1264.
[9] Brooklyn Theater Fire of 1876. Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Theatre_fire
[10] Photo of Thomas George Medinger (1862-1939).
https://familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/94wz-4TK
