The Swanee Weather Bureau Archives

Have you ever seen those glass swans that you fill with colored water that tell you when it's going to rain? My grandfather invented that! Yes, it's true. My grandfather, C. Lincoln Brown, was quite the tinkerer, who invented the Swanee Weather Bureau and a number of other gadgets. I have become the keeper of the archives, and for the first time ever, you can read about the rise and fall of Swanee.

The Story of the Swanee Weather Bureau

It all began when I gave Gramps a Cape Cod barometer for his birthday, something he had been wanting. They cost several dollars, and as he played with it, he wondered about making a smaller, inexpensive one, which would work on the same principle, i.e., barometric pressure causing liquid to rise in the smaller tube. He tried a simple one, like a test-tube, and then came up with the idea of the swan. Next came the task of finding a glass-blower to make it, for it would need to be hand-blown. He heard of a man whose work room was on the second floor in an alley in central Philadelphia. I remember going with Gramps to see him when I was about 7 months pregnant with your Mom. The man agreed to take the job. So Gramps applied for a patent, but could not get one because, while the idea of a swan barometer was new, neither the swan design or the barometer were new, so the patent was denied. He was able to get a copyright on the name Swanee, and the design of the box, which Dot did. Many people copied the swan barometer, but they could not call it "Swanee."

Now the important thing to do was to sell the swans. Gramps sent a sample to Macy's Department Store in New York, and John Wanamaker in Philadelphia. You can imagine how excited he was when he received an order from Macy's for 500 swans, followed by an order from Wanamakers. How could he possibly do all the work necessary to market them, and manage his store at the same time? Somehow he managed to fill these orders, and soon received many more. Through his business he knew a man in Merchantville who did not have a regular job, and was willing to take over the swan business, paying Gramps a royalty of one cent on each swan sold. (If I remember correctly, the glassblower got 30 cents for each swan, and they were sold for 50 cents each.) So this was arranged, and for several years Gramps received a check each month for around $30 - that is a lot of swans! Of course, competition soon flooded the market with copies of the Swanee Weather Bureau, since there was no patent, and Mr. Wells, the man who was selling them, fell several months behind in his payments, saying that business was slow.

Now in the spring of 1940 we found a house that we wanted to buy - we had been renting - and we needed a down payment of $1,300 (the price of the house was $6,400) We were struggglying to find cash for the down payment, so Gramps told Mr. Wells that if he would pay him the money he still owed him, he could discontinue the royalties, and he could have the whole business himself -- he paid immediately! The Swanee continued to sell for a few more years, then the market was saturated with all the copies.