In my first post on Brandis High Grade sextants [1], I wrote that I’d had little luck finding Brandis high grade vernier sextants like the one in Brandis Catalog No. 20. The only example I had managed to find was Brandis #2864, a well-preserved sextant made sometime before World War I. A Brandis sextant with serial number 3193 at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum was indeed a high grade sextant, but it was a puzzle to me because it was a micrometer sextant, not a vernier sextant like Brandis #2894 or the high grade sextant that appears in Brandis Catalog #20. I’ll discuss what I’ve since learned about Brandis #3193 in an upcoming post. Here I’ll discuss two other high grade sextants that I came upon after my first post on Brandis high grade sextants appeared in December 2016.
As part of my Brandis sextant taxonomy research, I would regularly look at sextants listed at auction and antique dealer websites. While I was primarily interested in Brandis sextants, sextants made by other companies were also of interest, especially those marked with U.S. Naval Observatory (USNO) numbers. In the span of two days in January 2018 I came upon two high grade sextants that appeared to be identical to the high grade vernier sextant in Brandis Catalog #20 except that both sextants were marked ‘T.G. Medinger N.Y.’ rather than with the Brandis company name [2]. Both sextants were marked with manufacturer’s serial numbers and USNO serial numbers. One sextant was being auctioned on eBay by someone in Massachusetts who acquired it at an estate auction; the other sextant was being auctioned by an antiques dealer in California. If there was a connection between the sextant owners it wasn’t obvious, but if there wasn’t a connection then the close timing of the appearance of these two sextants online seemed quite a coincidence.
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Left: Medinger #3125/USNO#1042. Right: Medinger #3142/USNO#1026 |
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It was natural to think ‘T.G. Medinger’ was the name of the company that made these sextants, but I suspected they were made by Brandis and Sons. They had the same frame pattern as a Brandis high grade sextant, details of their construction that I could see in posted photos appeared to match, and in the many hours I had spent researching sextants I’d never heard of a sextant manufacturer by the name of T.G. Medinger. But what really got my attention was that the serial numbers stamped into the sextant frames, 3125 and 3142, were suggestively close to that of the Smithsonian’s high grade sextant, Brandis #3193. I had found a number of Brandis sextants with manufacturer’s serial numbers in the 3000s, some of them discussed in earlier posts [3,4], but I’d rarely seen a sextant made any other company with manufacturer’s serial number in the 3000s.
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Serial numbers markings on Medinger #3125/USNO#1042 |
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Serial number markings on Medinger #3142/USNO#1026. The markings are hard to read in the photo at left but according to the eBay posting for this sextant they are ‘T.G. Medinger N.Y.’ and ‘3142’ |
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The USNO serial number markings on the Medinger sextants indicated that they had been U.S. Navy property, and the numbers themselves, 1026 and 1042, were in the range of sextants acquired by the Navy and inspected at the Naval Observatory around the time of World War I [5] (this table will be updated in a future post). Besides Brandis and Sons, the only instrument manufacturers I knew of that made sextants for the Navy around the time of the first World War were Keuffel & Esser and Buff & Buff. But by World War I the serial numbers these two companies were assigning to their instruments were in the five-digit range, nowhere close to the Medinger sextant serial numbers [6,7].
My suspicion that Medinger sextants #3125 and #3142 were made by Brandis led me to look more carefully than I otherwise might have at the photos the sellers of these sextants had posted. Both sextants were in boxes fitted with a thick wire handle and two counter clockwise-rotating closure hooks, which I recognized as the standard box hardware of World War I era Brandis sextant boxes. I’d never seen this hardware on any other manufacturer’s sextant boxes, and an article in a TIGHAR publication states this hardware to be a distinctive identifying feature of Brandis sextant boxes based on their sextant research [8]. A photo of the inside of the Medinger #3125 sextant box confirmed that it was a Brandis sextant box. The Brandis company name and address can be seen stamped in ink, partly covered by a sticker of the nautical instrument shop that presumably sold the sextant as used equipment after the U.S. Navy had disposed of it. Another photo of the same box shows the number 1042, the USNO serial number of the sextant, stamped into the box. The sextant matches the box, thus Medinger #3125/USNO#1042 was still in the box in which it was supplied to the U.S. Navy around the time of World War I.
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Left: Box for Medinger #3125; Right: A Brandis sextant box |
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Brandis company name and USNO serial number 1042 inside the box for Medinger #3125/USNO#1042 |
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If the firm T.G. Medinger didn’t make sextants, at least not these two sextants, what did it do? My internet research indicated that Thomas G. Medinger was a nautical instrument dealer in lower Manhattan from the late 1890s to the first few decades of the 1900s. He was the fourth of seven sons of Eugene F. Medinger, a nautical instrument dealer in lower Manhattan during the second half of the 1800s. In the U.S Census for the year 1870 the entry for Eugene’s occupation is ‘Dealer in chronometers’; after the word chronometers there is a ‘+c’, which I take be equivalent to ‘etc.’ At nautical antique dealer websites I found several instruments including three sextants that had Eugene Medinger trade labels pasted inside the boxes in which they were stored. The best-preserved label, inside the box for a chronometer, appears below. The other trade labels I found are nearly identical to this one and identify Eugene Medinger as a chronometer dealer and list sextants among the items sold in his shop. None of the three sextants in Medinger-labeled boxes were made by Eugene Medinger; two of them were made in England and the third was marked with the name of another New York nautical instrument shop.
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The 1870 U.S. Census Record for the Medinger family, Brooklyn, N.Y. |
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Eugene F. Medinger Trade Label |
New York City business directories indicate that Eugene Medinger was in business with a partner name Costigan in 1856 and with a partner named Hewitt in 1860. A mid-nineteenth century octant in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum [9] is in a wooden box that has a label inside it that documents another partnership, Duren & Medinger, Chronometers, No. 20, Burling Slip, New York.
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Mathematical, Nautical, and Philosophical instruments section of Wilson’s Business Directory of New-York City, 1856 |
Trow’s New York City Directory, 1860 |
Business directories indicate that by 1877 Eugene was in business for himself at 115 Broad Street. This address and his previous ones close to lower Manhattan’s busy commercial waterfront. The city block where Eugene’s shop was located is now occupied by a large office building, but an 1893 street map of the area [10] indicates the building that housed Eugene’s shop had about 23 feet of street frontage and went back 47 feet from the sidewalk. I imagine that like most small buildings in lower Manhattan at the time it was no more than six stories tall, perhaps only two or three stories. Various business directories put Eugene Medinger’s shop at 115 Broad Street for the next twenty years.
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Chronometers section of Rand’s New York City Business Directory for 1877 |
Trow’s New York City Business Directory for 1897 |
Eugene Medinger died on April 2nd, 1904, in his home at 148 President Street, Brooklyn. According to the April 4 (Monday) issue of the Brooklyn Daily Times [11]:
“He had been ailing for three weeks but was able to attend to his business until last Tuesday when his disease developed into pneumonia. In 1850 he engaged in the nautical business on Broad Street in Manhattan and for a number of years he has been assisted by his son, Eugene B. Medinger who will continue his business.”
By the time Eugene F. Medinger’s business passed into the hands of his oldest son Eugene, his fourth-oldest son Thomas had been operating his own nautical instrument shop in Manhattan for several years. I didn’t find as quite as much information about Thomas G. Medinger’s business as I did about his father’s, but what I found suggests the old adage “like father, like son” applies. The earliest mention of Thomas’s shop that I found was in the chronometers section of an 1898 business directory [12]. Thomas’s business address, 24 Beaver Street, appears in the line below his father’s; Thomas’s shop was just a few short city blocks from his father’s. A New York City directory published in 1913 indicates that Thomas’s shop had moved a few doors down to 16 Beaver Street [13]. A business directory published in 1920 [14] lists Thomas Medinger’s shop at 18 Beaver Street; by this time Medinger sextants #3125 and #3142 had been acquired by the U.S. Navy and assigned the USNO serial numbers that are scratched into their frames.
Like his father before him, Thomas seems to have presented himself as being primarily a dealer in chronometers. Thomas G. Medinger is listed in the chronometers section of business directories that are organized by product type, and the word chronometers appears after his name in directories in that list names alphabetically. In the 1920 business directory referred to above, Thomas’s shop is listed in the nautical instruments section as well as in the chronometers section.
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Chronometers Section of Trow’s Business Directory for Manhattan and the Bronx (1898) |
Trow New York City Directory for 1913-1914 |
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Left: Chronometers section of Port of New York Annual, 1920. Right: Nautical instruments section of same; list of names extended over two columns. |
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The six story building at 16 Beaver Street and the four story building at 18 Beaver Street where Thomas Medinger's shops were once located still stand. I live in New York City, and when I saw Google’s street view of this building I realized that I’d walked by them on countless occasions.
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Google street view of 16 and 18 Beaver Street, Manhattan, former locations of Thomas G. Medinger’s shop. |
Nothing I found in my research ruled out the possibility that sextants #3125 and #3142 were made by Thomas G. Medinger, but it seemed more likely that Thomas, like his father Eugene, operated a small nautical instrument retail business specializing in chronometers and other instruments and items needed for navigation at sea. My time spent looking at sextants and other nautical instruments at antique dealer websites and museum collections suggested that it was fairly common for small nautical instrument shops to have manufacturers provide them with instruments customized with the shop’s name. My guess was that Thomas had paid Brandis and Sons to make high grade sextants marked with his name.
I thought that I had uncovered all that I was likely to find on the subject of the Medinger sextants and only my inertia as a blogger prevented me from completing a post covering all that I’ve just written back when I came upon the Medinger sextants in early 2018. But to my surprise, a few months later, while visiting the National Archives in Washington D.C., in search of a link between the Nikumaroro sextant box and the USS Bushnell, I found documents that proved that Brandis and Sons had indeed made high grade sextants for Thomas Medinger and that sextants #3125 and #3142 were almost certainly among them. This will be discussed in my next post.
Comments, corrections, additional relevant facts, differing viewpoints, etc., are welcome. Send to gardnersghost@gmail.com
Footnotes/References
[1] The Ghost of Gardner Island. Brandis Sextant Taxonomy, Part Two: High Grade Sextants
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-brandis-sextant-taxonomy-part-two.html
[2] The links to the web pages where I found these sextants became inactive after the sextants were sold. Medinger #3125 was listed at iCollector.com, Medinger #3142 at eBay. See Supporting Material for photos of the web pages.
[3] The Ghost of Gardner Island. What Do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part One
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-do-numbers-3500-and-1542-tell-us.html
[4] The Ghost of Gardner Island. Brandis Sextant Taxonomy, Part Five: Five Inch Radius Sextants
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2017/02/brandis-sextant-taxonomy-part-five-five.html
[5] The Ghost of Gardner Island. What Do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? Part Two.
https://gardnerghost.blogspot.com/2015/03/what-do-numbers-3500-and-1542-tell-us.html
[6] A Keuffel & Esser serial number chronology originally published the January 1991 issue of Surveyor's Historical Society Magazine Backsights can be found at: http://www.surveyhistory.org/how_old_is_my_k_&_e%20Instrument.htm
[7] As far as I know, there isn’t a published Buff & Buff serial number chronology. In the Supporting Materials section I’ve included a screen shot of a listing for a Buff & Buff sextant auctioned in 2007. According to this listing the USNO Inspection Certificate in the sextant’s box is dated December 12, 1918, the Buff & Buff serial number is 11778, and the USNO serial number is 1065. The Buff&Buff serial number series must have reached 11778 by December 1918. Further evidence in the Supporting Materials section for What Do the Numbers 3500 and 1542 Tell Us? is a photo of the USNO Certificate for Buff & Buff sextant #13030/USN0#1231 which is dated May 13, 1919.
[8] Numbers Game, Earhart Project Research Bulletin, November 15, 2008.
https://tighar.org/Projects/Earhart/Archives/Research/Bulletins/52_NumbersGame/52_NumbersGame.html
[9] The wording of the Duren & Medinger label is given in the description of the octant at the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s website: https://newbedford.emuseum.com/objects/198021/octant-in-keystone-box?ctx=06cb72251a7e06f2d6f542dfbf7113296f385ab2&idx=1
[10] Plate 2. [Map bounded by Broad St., William St., Fulton St., East River]. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1893.
https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/3fb67b10-c5fa-012f-0aa0-58d385a7bc34?canvasIndex=0
[11] According to 1870 U.S. Census entries for members the Medinger family that appears in this post, the middle name of Eugene F. Medinger’s oldest son, also named Eugene, started with the letter ‘T’, not a ‘B’. The letter ‘B’ in the obituary must an error.
[12] Trow’s Business Directory of the Boroughs of Manhattan and The Bronx, City of New York, 1898. Page 242.
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89073030082&seq=5
[13] Trow General Directory of the Boroughs of Manhattan and Bronx, City of New York 1913-1914. Published in 1913. Page 850. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b79821f0-7d1a-0134-e193-00505686a51c
[14] Port of New York Annual, 1920. Smith's Publishing Company, Inc. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100119391
