From the 18th up to the end of the 19th century, various instruments designed for measuring the densities of liquids struggled to become accepted laboratory apparatus. Of those, several instruments use the principle of comparing the heights of liquid columns, raised by the same pressure difference. Proposals for such instruments can be found all over Europe and North America, as well as their widespread and immediate rejection by the scientific community they were meant for. The main (projected) fields of application were chemical, pharmaceutical and physical laboratories. As widespread as the idea might have been, its continued failure seems not to have been as well known. In my talk I will explain the different instruments of this type, starting with a device described by Pieter van Musschenbroek in his "Elementa Physicae" in 1747 and present not only a genealogy of them, but also address their failure. For this analysis the written sources were carefully examined. Moreover, two instruments were reconstructed according to all available sources. The first one is the earliest known instrument of this type, as depicted by Musschenbroek. The second one is the so-called Litrameter, constructed by the well-known chemist Robert Hare in 1826. The practice with these two instruments is compared to the written arguments and criticism. This survey, as a microhistoric analysis, sheds light on processes that lead to the rejection of instruments, using classic analysis of written sources and the opportunities of experimental history.