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gauge is still the base design of the one used in home
weather stations today. Such meteorological
experimentation was obviously a popular pursuit
among men of learning at this time as we’ll see in
a little while with Wren’s contemporaries the
Roberts’ Boyle and Hooke also dabbling in weather
measuring instrumentation along with their day jobs.
Pre-Science: Rolling Stones & Warm Socks
It was Aristotle who coined the phrase meteorology
around 350 BC when he wrote his Meteorologica,
which concerned itself with anything that fell from,
or was suspended in, the sky. He attributed everything
to four primary bodies: fire, water, air and earth and
that was about it for the next 2000 years. In the
meantime in Ancient Rome there were two stones,
both called the lapis manalis (from the Latin, stone
of the Manes, spirits of the underworld) One, always
placed in the foundations of a city, covered a gate to
Hades, the abode of the dead but the other was a rain
charm used in a ceremony known as aquaelicium
(Latin, calling the waters). This sacred stone was kept
outside the city walls in a temple of Mars but when
the city suffered a drought the stone was dragged into
the senate and water was poured over it while
offerings were made to Jupiter, calling for rain.
In AD 98 the senator and historian Tacitus said of
England “The sky is obscured by constant rain and
cold, but it never gets bitterly cold”. This forlorn
outpost of the Roman Empire must have come as a
terrible shock to the lightly-clad legionnaires - we
get 1000 hours sunshine less each year than Rome.
At Hexham in the chilly north of England young
Roman soldiers prayed for the rain to stop and sent
letters home petitioning not the gods for sunshine, but
their mums for warm socks. You can see these little
wooden postcards, the Vindolanda tablets, in the
British Museum, on our tours of
The Ancients at
Home
this Spring and Summer.
deep that almost 70 per cent of British people check
the weather forecast at least once a day. And it is a
fascination that appears to increase with age, with
more than 80 per cent of over-55s seeking out a daily
forecast, compared to 42 per cent of those aged 18
to 24. For more than half of us our conversation turns
to the weather at least once every six hours. Perhaps
we’re wise to keep an eye on things. After all entire
civilisations have collapsed or prospered because of
the weather, battles have been lost and won. Maybe
not every society in the world has been as interested
in the weather as us but the whole world has
benefitted from our interest because it has been British
men, often amateurs tinkering about in the shed, who
have led the way.
Men have always been interested in the weather. For
early man it was the very stuff of life or death and so
it became central to the very earliest religious and
spiritual practices. Survival depended on
good
weather, especially on rain in the parched lands
between (meso) the rivers (potamia) Euphrates and
Tigris. But too much rain could also herald disaster as
in the mighty flood described in one of the world’s
earliest literary works found in the ruins of the Great
Library of Ninevah from ancient Mesopotamia, the
5000 year old Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s a flood that has
many similarities to later Biblical descriptions of
Noah’s great flood. In India, at about the same time,
some five millennia ago, an enterprising “Chancellor
of the Exchequer” devised a system of taxation based
on the amount of rain a landowner had received.
Behind this was a very sensible instruction to plant
seeds suited to the level of rainfall measured by the
gauge. After all, you can’t tax the man who has no
money. This is one of the earliest mentions of a rain
gauge. The first English rain gauge was invented by
that polymath Sir Christopher Wren, one time
President of the Royal Society. His self-emptying rain
School trip to Vindolanda