`Those whom the gods love die young," said the Greek playwright Menander many centuries ago. Perhaps this was the case with William Molyneux, the tercentenary of whose death occurs tomorrow. He died on October 11th, 1698, at the early age of 42, but despite his premature demise, he achieved a lasting place in the history of Irish meteorology.
Dublin in the closing years of the reign of Charles II was a pleasing city for the comfortable classes. War and tension in the time of Cromwell had been succeeded by a period of prosperity and peace: the city had grown rapidly, spreading far beyond it s medieval boundaries, and a man of culture with a taste for philosophy and science, might find many places worse in which to live.
This was the milieu in which William Molyneux made his mark, and later generations would remember him in different ways. To patriots, Molyneux was the illustrious author of The Case of Ireland's being bound by Acts of Parliament in England, a nationalistic tract which merited sufficient attention for it to be condemned by the London Parliament for being "of dangerous tendency to the Crown and to the people of England".
To the more literary minded, Molyneux was the prolific correspondent of the philosopher John Locke, whose contributions to Some Familiar Letters between Mr Locke and Several of his Friends made it such a pleasant browse. But to meteorologists, William Molyneux will always be the man who compiled the first series of scientific weather observations in this country.
Molyneux's lifetime was an era of rapid development in the field of scientific instruments, and he and others of his ilk were quick to appreciate their potential for gaining an insight into the behaviour of the atmosphere. Molyneux was discouraged, however, by the difficulty of acquiring them: "I am living in a kingdom barren of all things," he lamented in 1681, "but especially of ingenious artificers: I am wholly destitute of instruments on which I can rely".
But things improved, and in March, 1684, Molyneux was able to begin a "Weather Register" at Trinity College, which for the first time in Ireland included readings of barometric pressure. By June 2nd that year he had compiled enough material to present a paper to the Dublin Society on "The Observations of the Weather for the Month of May, with the Winds and the Heights of the Mercury in the Baroscope".
He sent a copy of his May Register to Oxford University, where it can be consulted to this very day by those who care to visit the Bodleian Library of that institution.