The Advertisement from the Journal

Photographers Comments
This is the original advertisement from the old Photo Journal
And it does mention it as a Typometer.
Maybe there is something about Typography (as mentioned by Phil) that we dont know about.

Topography

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This article is about Topography as the study of landforms at any scale. For other uses, see Topography (disambiguation).
For discussion of land surfaces themselves, see Terrain.

A topographic map with contour intervals


Topography (Greek topos, "place", and graphia, "writing") is the study of Earth's surface features or those of planets, moons, and asteroids.
In a broader sense, topography is concerned with local detail in general, including not only relief but also vegetative and human-made features, and even local history and culture. This meaning is less common in America, where topographic maps with elevation contours have made "topography" synonymous with relief. The older sense of Topography as the study of place still has currency in Europe.
For the purposes of this article, topography specifically involves the recording of relief or terrain, the three-dimensional quality of the surface, and the identification of specific landforms. This is also known as geomorphometry. In modern usage, this involves generation of elevation data in electronic form. It is often considered to include the graphic representation of the landform on a map by a variety of techniques, including contour lines, Hypsometric tints, and relief shading.[1][2][3]

__________________
Regards....Phil

If it moves shoot it. If it doesn't move, still shoot it.

In conclusion.
Topo from the Greek meaning place and meter from the Greek meaning measure.
= Topography - measurement to a place OR Rangefinder.
I close my case

__________________
Regards....Phil

If it moves shoot it. If it doesn't move, still shoot it.

Well thank you Phil. You know just like you memtioned in the first inst. this has the feeling that it is used more by surveyors than by photographers. Although maybe it may well have been sold to photographers as a way to find the distance of a subject for the purpose of focusing.
Well that's what I think, after all I don't think there was much in the way of range finders on those early Camers.

Cheers,