A DAY IN THE LIFE OF... A DAY IN THE LIFE OF...
In this issue, we follow Andrea Bowen, Technical Product Manager at Casella, as she describes a typical day at a company with a history unlike any other in the industry.
Working in the industrial hygiene division at Casella, my days are never quite the same. Often, they are a whirlwind of devising product development strategies, spreadsheets, meetings, and lots of customer interaction. Coffee is critical!
On this particular day, I arrived at my desk, coffee in hand, and opened up my Inbox. Immediately, I saw the usual – messages from sales, marketing, customers and the other product managers, but something else caught my eye…
An email from Lisa in New Zealand read: “I’ve inherited an instrument from my late father, the Casella London 283. I would love to know more about this item – what was it used for”?
There was a similar email from
Donna in The United States, who had discovered an instrument in her late father’s toolkit and Neil, from the UK, had got in touch upon discovering a piece of Casella equipment in a storeroom.
Solving this kind of enquiry – providing the year it was used in and what it was used for – is not an easy process. Casella has been in operation since 1799 and our product range has grown and evolved throughout this time. Cesare Tagliabue, the company founder, was an Italian instrument maker – a man shaped by the Renaissance period where scientific men were encouraged, as was the instrumentation equipment they created.
Upon arriving in London, he immediately began making and selling a variety of instruments including thermometers. By 1818, these goods were sold throughout the world, from Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon, Spain and Italy. Louis Pascal Casella, Tagliabue’s son-in-law, went into partnership with his father-in- law before his death. Casella was established as the company name in the mid 1850’s.
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Louis quickly became the leading scientific and metrological instrument maker in Europe, if not the world, with Charles Darwin, David Livingstone and Francis Galton as customers, men today revered for their contribution to the fields of evolution and exploration. Governments worldwide including The United States, India, Spain and Portugal were also using Casella instrumentation, as were observatories across Washington, Calcutta and Mauritius.
I began investigating Lisa’s enquiry first, and began the usual process of trawling through the catalogues here in the office and speaking to the service engineers whose experience and knowledge seems limitless! After a quick comb through, we discovered that the product she had was not on our records at the offices. This meant that the product was pre-1950, of which records are kept at the British Science Museum. After a few comparisons via the online catalogue we came to the conclusion that the equipment Lisa had dated back to 1900, and was most likely used to record tidal flow or a drop in water level.
During this period Charles Frederick Casella, the son of Louis, was running the business. Rowland Mill, who worked for Charles and would later manage Casella, described Charles as a man of steely determination who would ‘never let an instrument leave the bench if he thought it was not as good in workmanship, performance and finish as it could be.’ At this time, clinical thermometers to Brazil were the largest source of profit for the business. When World War I ended in 1918, Casella launched modernised surveying equipment, some completely new and others old favourites, with a redesign.
Armed with this knowledge, Donna’s enquiry proved to be an easier product to identify. After searching through a few catalogues, I found what I was looking for. With World War II, came a greater need than ever
before for modernised surveying equipment. This included the concept of photogrammetry- using surveying to ascertain measurements between objects. Donna’s product was from 1955 – used for looking at aerial photographs in World War II – similar to a modern day Google Earth.
The final task of the day was to solve Neil’s enquiry, who had found an old Casella London Sunshine Recorder in a store room. A quick look at the Casella logo and another chat with the service engineers told me that this product dated from around the 1960’s/1970’s and was on the metrological side of the business, a development from where Louis Pascal Casella had steered the business back in the 1800’s.
In the world of scientific instrumentation products did not start to dramatically change shape until the onset of the digital age – the technology within them remained fairly straightforward, yet ingenious in simplicity. The Casella products were beautiful pieces of engineering and craftsmanship. Today, our products and services are exported to over 50 countries worldwide, with offices in China, India and the US and we remain as dedicated as ever to reducing occupational health and environmental risk impacts through such monitoring systems and precision instrumentation.
Days like today make me feel extremely proud to work for a company whose heritage remains a real part of its work today. Knowing where we came from certainly helps us know where we are going! Speaking to people who have stumbled across our equipment and are truly intrigued by it, and our work, is fantastic. It reminds me why I wanted to join the company in the first place, as it innovates and paves the way for innovative equipment to this day.
Long may it continue!
www.casellasolutions.com
www.tomorrowshs.com
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