In his wistful musings about the untapped potential of incumbents of Stoke Poges cemetery, Thomas Gray provides us with a triple paradigm:
Some village-Hampden that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.
Cromwell and Milton are well known, but who was Hampden?
John Hampden was a minor nobleman of middle England, born in 1594. He achieved prominence in the 1630s for his plucky resistance to a tax imposed by Charles I, the so-called "Ship Money", and went to prison rather than discharge his dues.
This made him something of a cause celebre and he subsequently became a prime mover in the revolt against the king that was to culminate in the toppling of the royal. But Hampden himself did not live to see that day; he was killed in a skirmish during the preceding Civil War in 1642.
Such matters are of relevance to "Weather Eye" in that mute inglorious Miltons also exist in meteorology. In a discipline that came to be dominated in the present century by advocates of Fahrenheit and Celsius, the scale of temperature proposed by Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur provided a third option that for a time seemed likely to be universally adopted. But it is rarely heard of nowadays.
In 1709 Fahrenheit had tackled the temperature problem by suggesting that the melting point of ice and the temperature of the healthy human body might be used as two "fixed points" to graduate thermometers.
Somewhat later, around 1740, Anders Celsius from Sweden chose the boiling point of water as the second of his fixed points, and divided the interval between that and its freezing point into 100 equal degrees. Reaumur's basic idea was very similar but he was more methodical in choosing the size of his degrees.
Reaumur was French, born in 1683 at La Rochelle. He used alcohol as the fluid for his thermometer, and taking the volume of this liquid at the freezing point of water as being 1,000 units, he noticed that when it was immersed in boiling water it expanded to a volume corresponding to 1,080 units: it seemed sensible to him, therefore, to divide the interval into 80 equal degrees.
His scale was proposed in 1730, some 14 years before Celsius's, and became widely used throughout much of Europe for the next 150 years. It was not until this century that the decimal simplicity of the scale devised by Celsius resulted in its being adopted as the norm. And oblivion was the lot of Reaumur.