A friend had a dial barometer that supposedly came from a ship in WWII, sort of plain but something I'd really like to be gifted if he ever gets tired of it. I can't recall the name of the manufacturer, but did say something about the navy on it, I think.
Again, if I recall it had sort of a chain drive (maybe I'm hallucinating) and was literally so sensitive that we had fun taking it off the wall hook and going down stairs, seeing a difference in the needle position, then repeating it. Maybe we spoofed ourselves, but it seemed with the big hand and generous dial size, and the heft of it's construction, that it may literally have been able to do that.
With your extensive collection, do you think we were seeing a real effect, or not?
On the other hand, I do know that when I put a Vaisala WXT520 into monitoring, I had run it for a couple months on my screened in porch. when I put it up on my ham tower aways, I did have to tweak the setting to compensate.
I know sometimes folks get all excited about precision and accuracy. Yet as a kid I sort of scoffed at my 19 year older sister in college and doing quantitative analysis in chemistry and saying the lab had a balance scale that could weigh her fingerprint. Yet when I was there at the same school (new chemistry building) I took a series of classes and indeed weighed my fingerprint many times. Some things are really true, I guess.