Slot/hole wire gauges
Slot and hole wire gauge plates have been around for a long time. They are used by trying the piece of wire in successively smaller slots or holes until it no longer fits. The diameter is then assumed to be somewhere between that size and the next larger (the last slot/hole through which the wire would pass).
These measuring devices are inherently crude, and work best only when the wire being measured is known to be of a particular diameter system. The modern hole plate shown here, for example, is for small numbered drills. Since these drills are manufactured to very fine tolerances, a drill which fits in the 65 hole but not the 66 is safely assumed to be a 65. However, the assumption would not be valid if one used such a plate to sort metric drills.
Because of this inability to indicate diameters between steps and the difficulty in producing such plates (requiring either precision boring or sawing/filing), I believe it is unlikely that such devices where ever widely used in instrument building. Why go to all that trouble when a gauge which is much more precise can be made with much less work? By the time such plates could be mass-produced cheaply and accurately using modern metal machining processes, the micrometer had been invented and was readily available.