Exploring our archives

As you probably know, we are experiencing the second hottest January on record. Although official records began around a century after the date of the Hooke folio, predicting and understanding the weather was also important to Hooke and his contemporaries.

In the early part of the folio there are discussions about how to measure very low temperatures and also how Barometers can be refined and developed to make them more accurate. There are also quite a lot of letters where people write in complaining that their Barometers are not working. They are also interested in extremes of weather and the folio details correspondence about a hurricane in Tangiers and how the changes in the barometer reflected the change in weather. Interestingly, Hooke’s diary, also records the weather. To start with he divides the page in half where half contains the events of the day and the other details the weather, though later he records all this information together.  

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