a signRooster weathervanes

A rooster cut or moulded in sheet metal, balanced on a spindle, and put on a roof to show which way the wind blows. It is the oldest American use of a chicken as a public sign, it predates every wing counter by centuries, and the shape it settled into — flat body, raised comb, fanned tail, one leg forward — is the same silhouette a fried chicken sign draws today. American vanes were made in copper and zinc by nineteenth-century firms working from moulds, and museums now hold them as folk sculpture; the Smithsonian American Art Museum has released photographs of several under CC0.

A vane is a shape mounted off-centre on a vertical spindle so the wind turns the larger surface downwind and the smaller end points into it. The rooster's tail is the sail; the head is the pointer. Beneath it sit the fixed direction letters, N, S, E, W, on rods.

It is a working instrument before it is decoration, and the shape has to earn its aerodynamics: the tail has to be broad, the body flat, the whole thing light enough to turn in a light breeze and strong enough to survive a gale.

Tradition holds — the cockerel came to European roofs through the church, where a weathercock on a steeple carried a religious reading, and the practice moved to civic and farm buildings and then across the Atlantic. The detail of that history is not something this project has sourced; what is documented is the American object that resulted.

Inference — by the time the rooster reaches an American barn it is no longer making an argument about anything. It is a shape everybody recognises at a distance, which is the only quality a roof ornament needs.

Nineteenth-century American vanes were commonly made of sheet copper hammered into carved wooden moulds in two halves and soldered together, sometimes gilded, sometimes zinc-headed for weight, and mounted on an iron rod. Some were carved in wood and cut in flat sheet iron by a local smith.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds rooster vanes of this kind — its nineteenth-century examples are catalogued to anonymous makers — and has released images under CC0 through the Smithsonian Open Access programme, which is why they can be shown here and most later signage cannot.

Inference — compare a copper vane to a painted chicken on a fry counter's sign and the drawing is nearly the same: body in profile, comb and wattles exaggerated so they read at distance, tail fanned to fill the space, legs simplified to two strokes. The vane's constraints produced that shape — it had to be flat, balanced and legible from the ground — and the sign painter inherited it, because the sign has the same problem.

The difference is what the bird is claiming. On a barn it points at the weather. Over a fry counter it points at the menu.

A vane gives direction and nothing else. It does not measure speed, it lags in gusts, and it reads the wind at roof height rather than at ground level, which on a built-up street is a different wind altogether.

Tradition holds — farmers read them in combination with everything else they watched, and a vane's value was that it was visible from the field without going anywhere.

Tradition holds — old American vanes moved from roofs into the folk art market over the twentieth century, which pulled them off buildings and into rooms, and produced a reproduction trade making new vanes with artificial weathering. A vane indoors is a sculpture; a vane outdoors is an instrument; the same object is being valued for two different things, and the price is set by the first.