Weather and time: the link between early-modern meteorology and technologies of time

In January 12, 1684 William Musgrave in Oxford wrote with excitement to Francis Aston at the Royal Society of London that they had found a drawing of Cornelius Drebbel's perpetual motion machine amongst the papers of a doctor at Christchurch, a copy of which exists in the letterbooks of the Society. In his account, Drebbel and his clock were embraced as being of their scientific program. Such clock had been thought of as ancestral to Sir Christopher Wren's design for a weather clock, and the weather clock that had just been realized by Robert Hook. Also in 1684, Dr. Martin Lister introduced the first meteorological graph to the same circle, plotting instrumental readings against time. The engine of Drebbel's c. 1603 clock was, perhaps, a form of Galileo's weather-glass. Meteorology seemed to have a sense of its own history, even as it saw the work of describing the weather as historical. These same innovations survived into the 19th century, informing Luke Howard's Climate of London (1818), even to the point of his using an antique self-registering barometer to record the climate of his city. Since the very beginning of instrumental meteorology, the new philosophical instruments were seen in conjunction with the measurement of time, just as time and weather happily coincided in the common almanac. This not only reflects the practicalities of early attempts at understanding changes in the weather, but also a deeper connection, where weather is, in essence, the way Western Europeans experienced time. And then when meteorology over time became generalized, a new modern conception of climate arose, responding to sense of time and place. This paper will trace this relationship through the course of the 17th and 18th century, summarizing the forthcoming Weather and Time: the early history of instrumental meteorology: 1603 to 1818 from AMS Books.