Ambergate Terrometer: does anyone know what it was?

[3141]

Going through some old newspaper cuttings, I've found the attached report. It's from between October 1964 and June 1966, because another article (not shown) refers to Frank Cousins as the Minister for Technology, and it's probably from the Guardian which is what I regularly read at that time.

Ambergate in those days was a triangular station with six platforms.

Google found a terrometer, but it definitely wasn't this one.

Does anybody know what it was?

 

[snowball]

I looked in the Guardian online archive (suspecting the date would be 1st April, but it wasn't). It's from 8 January 1966. There seem to be some letters in reply on 18 January. As I'm not a subscriber to the archive, I can only get peephole views. I'll try to make sense of them later but meanwhile others can make their own attempts if they wish. I suggest a search confined to 18 January 1966. The word "terrometer" occurs 7 times on the same page on that date. The archive is here:

terrometer - Search - The Guardian Archive

The largest online newspaper archive, established in 2012. Used by millions every month for genealogy and family history, historical research, crime investigations, journalism, and entertainment. Search for obituaries, marriage announcements, birth announcements, social pages, national and local...

theguardian.newspapers.com

 

[Ducatist4]

A TerrAmeter (maybe a spelling error?) is related to logging boreholes and other similar geological features. That would fit in with the description i think.

 

[stuving]

It was a Ferrometer - later newspaper items reported that, and this is one of the makers' adverts from 1887:

 

[swt_passenger]

So it’s basically a Grauniad miss-spelling that’s led everyone off in the wrong direction?

 

[stuving]

So it’s basically a Grauniad miss-spelling that’s led everyone off in the wrong direction?

No, it was misread off the back of the thing by the original informant at the station.

 

[swt_passenger]

No, it was misread off the back of the thing by the original informant at the station.

Same effect though. I think I just found the same advert as you in the BNA. References seem to have peaked in the late 1800s.

 

[stuving]

In the 1880s there are newspaper items about the inventor, Major Francis Roubillac Conder CE, "an authority on the deodorisation of sewage". Some are letters arguing with those who claimed his "iron process" wasn't a new idea or didn't really work, others give a hint of how it worked. Basically it added a solution containing iron to the sewage, supposedly to kill the bacteria. I doubt the unit on the wall had sewage flowing through it, so it was perhaps a dosing control that sent the solution down a pipe into the sewage system.

That flow of news peaked in 1888, and then in December 1889 Conder died. So it was left to his licencees, Filmer and Mason, to promote the things.

Francis Conder (b. 1815) was initially a railway engineer, from his articleship around 1830. He made a lot of money as a contractor, which allowed him to devote the rest of his life to whatever he liked. There is a lengthy obituary in the ICE archives online. Nothing in that supports the idea that he was a major in the RE, so I suspect that is a confusion with his son Claude Reignier Conder, who certainly was.

The book The Men Who Built Railways appears to be a 1985 republishing of his memoir Personal Recollections of an Engineer.

 

[Rescars]

A bit of gentle surfing has revealed that Filmer and Mason were manufacturers of vertical engines and boilers, circular saw benches, engine frames, wheel ploughs, cultivators, scarifiers, land rollers, clod crushers, harrows, horse hoes, lifting jacks, sacks trucks, etc. Conder's Ferrometers seem rather different. I wonder why they were awarded the licence.

 

[stuving]

A bit of gentle surfing has revealed that Filmer and Mason were manufacturers of vertical engines and boilers, circular saw benches, engine frames, wheel ploughs, cultivators, scarifiers, land rollers, clod crushers, harrows, horse hoes, lifting jacks, sacks trucks, etc. Conder's Ferrometers seem rather different. I wonder why they were awarded the licence.

Probably just local contact - Conder had lived in Guildford since about 1880, and Filmer and Mason announced the product in 1887. "Williams Filmer and Mason, furnishing ironmongers", were around in Guildford as early as 1847, and had a foundry in the 1850s

 

[Rescars]

Probably just local contact - Conder had lived in Guildford since about 1880, and Filmer and Mason announced the product in 1887. "Williams Filmer and Mason, furnishing ironmongers", were around in Guildford as early as 1847, and had a foundry in the 1850s

If Conder was a Guildford resident, it makes perfect sense. Nothing like keeping things local!