UselessFinds
A Bottle Of Crystals That Predicts Weather, Badly

FitzRoy believed in it

Useless Gadgets

A Bottle Of Crystals That Predicts Weather, Badly

A teardrop of sealed liquid whose crystals change form as the weather does. It is decorative rather than accurate, and always has been.

Buy this nonsense$23.07$10.61(sponsored link, opens in a new tab)
  • storm glass
  • barometer
  • weather
  • victorian
  • desk decor
  • crystals

What Is This Thing?

A sealed teardrop of glass on a wooden base, filled with a clear solution of camphor, ammonium chloride and potassium nitrate in alcohol.

The crystals inside change. Sometimes they sit as clear liquid, sometimes as a fern-like frost up one side, sometimes as a dense cloud of flakes, sometimes as small stars drifting. The listing gives the traditional reading: clear for fair, cloudy for rain, flakes for snow, threads for wind.

Why You Don't Need It

It does not work. Not properly. The crystal growth responds to temperature, which correlates with weather in the loosest possible sense, and it does not respond to atmospheric pressure at all — which is the thing a barometer is supposed to measure.

Your phone is right and this is not.

Why You'll Buy It Anyway

Because the failure is historical rather than fraudulent. Storm glasses were taken seriously in the nineteenth century, and Robert FitzRoy — captain of the Beagle, founder of what became the Met Office — carried one and published reading instructions for it. He was an extremely capable man and he was wrong about this.

That makes it an unusually good object: a physical record of the moment when weather forecasting was still guessing, kept on a windowsill. And the crystals genuinely do change, so it is never quite the same twice.

A Bottle Of Crystals That Predicts Weather, Badly — photograph 2
A Bottle Of Crystals That Predicts Weather, Badly — photograph 3

Who It's Actually For

Windowsills, desks and anywhere with a temperature swing, which is what actually drives it. Cold glass near a window gives the most dramatic crystal growth, which is a point the sellers never make.

It also gives you something to look at with a visitor, which is not nothing for an ornament under eleven dollars.

before you click buy

Keep it out of direct sun and away from radiators. Heat dissolves the crystals entirely and a storm glass that has been sitting in a sunbeam is just a bottle.

Handle it as glass, because it is. The wooden base is not attached in most versions of this, and the teardrop rolls.

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