Microscope Museum

Collection of antique microscopes and other scientific instruments

 

      

Microscope 47 (J Parkes & Son, retailed by P Harris & Co; Worker model; mid 1910s)

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Based in Birmingham, England, Parkes produced good quality microscopes and other scientific equipment and supplies from the mid-1800s until well into the twentieth century. Recognizing the burgeoning market of students and middle-class amateurs, they focused on inexpensive instruments. James Parkes began his business in 1815 as a manufacturer of small items such as jewellery cases and other metal devices. James’ only son, Samuel, became a partner in about 1846, forming J Parkes and Son. By the 1850s, J. Parkes and Son were producing a variety of microscopes. Their 1857 catalogue prominently featured microscopes and prepared slides. Large numbers are known of later microscope models that were manufactured by J Parkes and Son but sold by other retailers. Samuel continued the business under the same name after his father’s death in 1877. Samuel had only one son, also named Samuel. That son, and a nephew, James Moulton, continued the business after the elder Samuel died in 1896. Moulton left the partnership in 1908, and Samuel T.H. Parkes continued alone for a number of additional years, at least until the late 1920s. Microscope 47 is most probably a Parkes’ Worker model which, however, is signed by the retailer ‘P Harris & Co Limited, Birmingham’. This company was originally started by Thomas Ellis, a surgeon, in 1817. At the time Philip Harris would have been only 15 or 16 years old; he joined Ellis in partnership in 1825. The company traded as a wholesale chemical laboratory, producing also medicines and drugs. In 1866, the firm was renamed Philip Harris Manufacturing Chemist & Druggist Co, and in 1890 moved to Edmund Street in Birmingham. The company was succeeded by Philip Harris Ltd in 1963. The stand of microscope 47 looks more similar to the microscope versions from 1914 (Figure 1), for example in the mirror’s support limb and back foot, making it possible to date this microscope to the mid 1910s.

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Figure 1. Illustration of the Parkes’s Worker microscope model as shown in an advertisement in the 1898 ‘Illustrated Annual of Microscopy’ (left) and in a 1914 advertisement from a Newcastle optical shop (right).

 

References

J. Parkes and Son (http://microscopist.net/ParkesJ.html), last accessed on 12.08.2020

The illustrated annual of microscopy (1898)

 

LAST EDITED: 15.08.2020