We find ourselves on a medieval market, where merchants sell their goods and citizen amble along the romantic cobblestone. The market barker raises his voice to announce a remarkable price drop for pork. The masses are electrified by that manifestation and rush to the butcher's market stall. He literally strains himself to process every order, and the boy, who is just a temporary personnel, is quite busy weighing the meat.
And look how good this boy operates his scale:
He puts the buyer's desired piece of meat in one of the two bowls. Then he throws big and small weights into the other bowl until the two bowls are roughly the same weight. Now he uses the difference between the mass of the two shells to calculate the mass of the meat. Then he hands the ware to the customer, while the butcher collects the money.
But also the nice flower girl on the market stall next to him uses a scale like that. It's particularly noticeable that she has a smaller kind of scale, maybe because she's just selling small quantities of herb, seeds and spices. One guy asks her: "What kinda scale is that?", and she answers: "It is a so-called beam scale, which I inherited from my father. It has a horizontal bar and two shells attached to it. It is a useful tool for my trading activities."
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The architecture of a beam scale is really simple. There is a beam, which can be manually orientated on the weight of the item with an indicator. It is a very versatile construction, which was used for many centuries and it it still in use for different types of jobs. Nowadays these old scales tend to be used for decoration in hotel rooms, history-charged shops and for other tasteful eye-catching establishments. They are very bad for travelling usage and fast weighing. Good weights for such scales are really expensive, too.