One September morn, a mail-order barometer from Abercrombie & Fitch arrived at the home of a man in Westhampton Beach, Long Island. The barometer’s needle sat squarely at 27.94 inches of pressure – i.e. hurricane. Granted, a breeze was blowing from the northeast. But hurricane? The man tapped the new instrument and shook it, but the needle failed to budge. So he rewrapped the barometer, enclosing a letter complaining of shoddy merchandise, and marched into town to the post office. Making his way home through winds that had turned southerly and mean, he found his house had disappeared in the Great New England Hurricane of 1938.    
    
Paul Adler relishes such lore of the almighty barometer. He cites the incident on www.barometer.ws, a website of his own creation, dedicated to the history, technology, collection, restoration, and sale of antique barometers. Venturing into the Chilmark woods to meet Paul and his barometer collection, I imagined a cross between a geezer and a geek, holed up in an eighteenth-century barn filled to the cobwebbed rafters with a riot of barometric whatnot. Instead, I found a most contemporary gentleman in an equally contemporary home that flatters his day job as a general contractor and designer.
    
Let the learning begin: my pre-enlightened idea of a barometer was a round thing, easily mistaken at a distance for a clock. Alas, this common, mechanical device with the round face – known as a banjo barometer – is a relative newcomer from the late 1800s. The real oldies, crafted between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, measure air pressure through the rise and fall of mercury housed in glass vacuum tubes. Picture a three-foot thermometer. In the early days, barometers not only predicted weather changes, they also measured altitude. The genesis of the barometer, in 1643, is credited to an Italian scientist who was ultimately condemned as a heretic – but I digress. His first barometer, a water-based contraption, was a thirty-five-foot giant that protruded from his roof. Fortunately, he soon discovered that a short tube of mercury could do the job of a tall tube of water, which made the thing a great deal more user-friendly.
    
Once the barometer craze caught on with the general public, about a century later, designers across Europe fashioned impeccable instruments housed in sleek cabinets of fine wood and glass. Nearly every family of means proudly displayed one of these costly beauties in the home.
  
Paul decks the halls of his own home and workshop with a variety of these collectibles, some still in restoration mode. A ship’s barometer, made in 1855, sways to compensate for wave action. The aneroid barometer, invented around 1880, records up to eight days of pressure readings on a roll of paper. An
angle barometer, resembling a boom-erang, economizes on height by encasing the mercury in a diagonal tube. Paul’s oldest and rarest piece, a beautifully inlayed Dutch instrument of the late 1700s, is known as a contra, or backward, barometer. As air pressure rises, the mercury column goes down, not up. Paul divulged the secret, but I’m not telling.  
    
Paul’s 1860’s barometer from Elmira, New York, is a rarity simply by virtue of being American. Though legend has it that Thomas Jefferson bought a British barometer in a Philadelphia shop on July 5, 1776 – I guess it was a slow day – American interest in the devices didn’t take off until the mid-1800s. Given the dearth of domestic makers, Americans mainly bought barometers from abroad. Compared to their fancy European cousins, old American barometers tend to be spare in design. “In the 1860s, the country was struggling to survive,” Paul says. “People weren’t making ornate things.” Collecting antique barometers today is likewise a bigger deal in Europe than in the U.S. Besides himself, Paul figures there are maybe four other serious collectors stateside, mainly in coastal areas. Only one repair shop in the country can fix the old instruments.   
    
Fascinated with the science of weather since his youth, Paul received his first barometer from his parents when he was in the eighth or ninth grade. “It’s the only belonging that’s survived since my childhood,” he says. He wasn’t hooked until about eight years ago, when he bought several antique barometers from a retired physician who was retiring from collecting, too. Paul began traveling to England, Holland, and France to stalk barometer shows and antique shops in search of more rare finds. “I recently heard from the doctor again. Now he wants to buy some of his collection back.”
    
The current weakness of the dollar in Europe hasn’t helped Paul’s hobby a bit. “Luckily, my collecting bug is over,” he says. Note to Paul: that’s what the doctor said, too. Paul’s website itemizes and prices his collection of forty-some instruments. He admits he has a few favorites – “the contras, the ships’ barometers” – that he hopes won’t sell.
    
“The main novelty about collecting antique barometers is that you own a part of history,” says Paul. “They’re like Martha’s Vineyard real estate: they’re not making any more.”
    
On the practical side, owning a barometer, old or new, could come in handy in some really odd place in the western world where power, telephone service, cable television, or Internet access can go on the fritz and stay there for days at a time.
    
As if you needed bad weather to make any of that stuff happen.