Of Wren and topical rhyme

Edmund Clerihew Bentley was an English journalist who died in 1956

Edmund Clerihew Bentley was an English journalist who died in 1956. He is remembered as the writer of the prototype of the modern detective novel, Trent's Last Case, but more particularly as the inventor of the clerihew, a wittily absurd verse form called after his second name, satirical and often biographical, and comprising four rhyming lines of uneven length. One of Bentley's own, for example, was:

It was a weakness of Voltaire's To forget to say his prayers, And one which to his shame, He never overcame.

Another example of a clerihew might be:

To be helped by Eoghan Harris May now and then embarrass; But those enlisting divine assistance, May find even more consumer resistance.

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But the clerihew which comes to mind today is one of Bentley's own:

Sir Christopher Wren Said `I'm going to dine with some men. If anyone calls, Say I'm designing St Paul's.'

Today is the 365th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Wren, who was born on October 20th, 1632. His chief claim to fame, as we know, is as the architect of St Paul's Cathedral in London, but before he took up architecture in the early 1660s, Wren was professor of astronomy at Oxford, and already a scientist of some repute. Meteorology was one of his abiding interests. Wren was as inventive a scientist as he was a builder, and he constructed a number of meteorological instruments which proved to be prototypes for those developed later. He is credited, for example, with inventing the "tipping-bucket" rain recorder, a device for measuring rainfall that is still used today. The recorder consists of a triangular-shaped container divided into two compartments, and pivoted about its centre like a see-saw. At any particular time, one half of the bucket is directly underneath the pipe leading from the funnel in which the rain is captured.

When a certain amount of water - say that equivalent to half a millimetre of rainfall - has been collected, the bucket overbalances; the water is tipped out, while at the same time the other half of the bucket is lined up underneath the water pipe. The device rocks back and forth indefinitely, "tipping" every time 0.5mm of rainfall has accumulated. The problem in Wren's day, and for centuries afterwards, was that there was no convenient method of counting the number of times the bucket tipped, and thereby calculating the amount of rainfall in a given period. Modern technology, however, has provided a solution: it can be arranged that the bucket trips a microswitch each time it tips, and the signal is then recorded electronically.