Watching the weather
Alexander Wallace, ‘Table of the Weather At Edinburgh Taken at Nine O’Clock each Morning Commencing on Wednesday 1st January 1783 […] Ending on Saturday 31st December 1796’
MS 0028
This manuscript diary of the weather is a fascinating example of dedicated observation by a private individual, and continues to prove useful to both historians and scientists.
As well as barometric pressure, temperature, wind and the ‘kind of weather’, Wallace occasionally records events, such as Vincent Lunardi’s hot-air balloon ascent from Edinburgh and unfortunate descent into the North Sea on 20 December 1785, an earthquake he felt on 1 August 1786, and the birth of his children. Similar records for Edinburgh’s weather had been recorded as early as 1733 in the first volume of the Medical Essays and Observations, a publication of the Philosophical Society, precursor to the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Such recording was part of a systematic attempt to consider the relationship between climate and health.
William Zachs writes: This manuscript weather journal, detailing Edinburgh’s weather from 1783 to 1796 is an item I often show people who come to visit the collection. We look at the manuscript and then look out the window. The weather three hundred years ago, the weather today… It was acquired quite early on in my collecting days – an auction in Edinburgh in 1992. I just thought it was a very curious manuscript. A theme centred on the city of Edinburgh was developing in my collection. And the idea of recording the weather had also become a theme. It’s part of a larger philosophical debate in the eighteenth century about climate and its influence on character and nations.
I was alarmed to find I had outbid the Scottish Meteorological Office for it. When they approached me through the auction house I was really delighted to bring the volume over to them. A friend and I had a very interesting tour through their archive, looking at similar journals. We discovered that the weather in my volume both overlapped with other volumes that they had but also gave new information where there was no surviving record of the weather in given months and years. The Met Office were very happy to have a photocopy, as researchers, novelists and other occasionally come there to find out the kind of weather on a given day.
Barometer, Balthazar Knie, c.1780
AAC 0759
This mahogany barometer, made in Edinburgh at Knie’s workshop in the Lawnmarket, was acquired to show the kind of instrument that the compiler of the ‘Table of the Weather’ manuscript would have used to record temperature and barometric pressure. We especially like Knie’s terms for the temperature: ‘Freezing’, ‘Temperate’, ‘Agreeable’, ‘Very Warm’, ‘Blood Heat’ and ‘Fever Heat’. Knie, a German émigré, arrived
in Edinburgh (via Cork in Ireland) in about 1775 and remained in Edinburgh, continuing to make such scientific instruments until 1815.
I couldn’t help imagining that the compiler of the weather journal had a Knie barometer – perhaps even the very one I have in the collection. And I had also always wondered who our anonymous weather man was. Long ago I listed the numerous brief notes in the margins that related to his personal life to work out his – or maybe her – identity. Some of the most useful clues I extracted were the periodic mentions of births. I made an assumption these might refer to the individual’s own children: ‘D born’, ‘E born’, ‘Alex’ born. This provided just enough to explore online Parish Registers for births in Edinburgh. Within minutes we had identified an Alexander Wallace as being the father, and our probable ‘weather man’. He turned out to be a banker, based at the Royal Exchange, now the City Chambers, of the firm Seton, Wallace & Co. He died in 1804 and is buried nearby in the family tomb in Greyfriars Kirkyard. It was then, by consulting our copy of Williamson’s Edinburgh Directory for 1790, that we found, with great delight, that he lived in Ramsay Garden, an address very close to Blackie House and with practically the same views of Edinburgh skies that our windows looked out onto. And with such an address it was indeed likely that Wallace acquired the barometer for his readings from Balthazar Knie, who was based very near by.
