Graphical details: the secret life of Christopher Wren's drawing of the weather clock

Historians have unanimously credited Christopher Wren with having constructed a weather clock (a self-registering instrument) in the early 1660s. This conclusion was based on the account of the French diplomat Balthasar de Monconys, which included a sketch uncannily similar to an undated drawing by Wren of the weather clock. By critically re-examining the available sources, I argue that one can infer that Wren never actually constructed a weather clock. What Monconys saw and sketched was, in fact, a drawing produced by Wren for a meeting of the Royal Society that took place on 8 January 1662. I further show that there is strong evidence to assume that Wren's drawing for the Royal Society is the undated drawing preserved at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The new context in which I place Wren's drawing provides an incentive to look at it with fresh eyes. Though the drawing does not represent a device actually constructed by Wren, it still bears (unexpected) connections to the material world that surrounded him. The analysis of the drawing developed in this article will be relevant for historians interested in the role that images can play as historical evidence.

‘Addicted to the opening of heads’

Chapter 6: ‘Addicted to the opening of heads: Cerebri anatome (1664–1683)’ provides a detailed bibliography, using the system described in chapter 4, of thirteen copies of Willis’s second published book in which are included two treatises: 4. Cerebri anatome; and 5. Nervorum descriptio et usus. These are the first of Willis’s treatises to be illustrated; of the twenty-three images engraved on fifteen printers’ plates, some are the work of Christopher Wren. The descriptions of these publications are preceded by a narrative highlighting the main bibliographic issues that characterize the various editions, states, and issues of these copies. Of these, some are already known but others are newly identified. {109 words}

‘To delineate with most skillful hands’

Chapter 3: ‘To delineate with most skillful hands: illustration and the printed works of Thomas Willis’ explains methods for illustrating the printed works. The engraved frontispieces, three allegorical and one depicting Willis and his circle dissecting a human body, are described. Variations of the engraved portrait, first drawn by David Loggan, are documented. The features of 416 separate ornaments, used by twenty-three printers, are described. These include engraved title pages, head and tail pieces, fleurons and decorated capitals. The provenance and details of forty plates illustrating the texts, including work by Christopher Wren, their different states and copies ‘borrowed’ by other authors are documented. Many illustrations of each type are included. The chapter concludes with one table summarizing the number of images, printers’ plate, and leaves found in a complete copy; and another comparing the states used for each book described in the bibliography. {142 words}

A Victorian Wrenaissance: Historical Narrative at St. Paul's Cathedral

The condition of St. Paul's Cathedral was central to concerns about the perception of London over the course of the nineteenth century. Designed by Sir Christopher Wren, it faced public criticism from the start. Unlike gothic Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's was an eclectic amalgam of gothic and neoclassical architecture; its interior was never finished. Efforts to decorate were boxed in by the strictures of Victorian architectural revivalism. This is the story of how academic historiography resolved a problem that aesthetic and architectural theory could not. Throughout the century, cathedral administrators sought to improve the cathedral by borrowing tools from historians with varying success. In the 1870s, a solution emerged when historians reinvented the Italian Renaissance as a symbol of liberal individualism. Their revisionist Renaissance provided an alternative to pure gothic or neoclassical revivalism, able to accommodate Wren's stylistic eclecticism. Scholars have traditionally plotted disputes about St. Paul's within broader architectural debates. Yet I argue that these discussions were framed as much by historical discourse as aesthetics. Turns in Victorian historiography eventually allowed architects to push past the aesthetic limits of the Battle of the Styles. New methods in Victorian historical research were crucial to nineteenth-century experiences of urban space.

Newton’s Laws of Motion

An obstacle to reading the Principia is presuming that the Laws of Motion attributed to Newton in physics textbooks, and the concept of force in them, are the same as those in the book; they are not. This chapter provides an account of his Laws and his conception of force as his contemporaries would have understood them. It does so first by giving the historical background to them in works by Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, John Wallis, and Christopher Wren; and then by reviewing the history of Newton’s own reformulations of them not just in the sequence of manuscripts leading up to the first edition, but extending even to the second edition. In the Principia the Laws serve as the basis for deriving conclusions about forces governing the motions in our planetary system from the motions of the bodies within it “among themselves.” Crucial to their doing so are their six Corollaries, some of them initially formulated as Laws. The history of their development too is covered in parallel with that of the Laws, emphasizing their crucial role in licensing those inferences regarding forces from the observed motions.

The Scientist-Enabler

This chapter talks about the most prestigious office Joseph Banks held, which was president of the Royal Society for an unbroken forty-one and a half years from November 1778. It points out that the Royal Society was founded on 28 November 1660 by a committee of twelve natural philosophers following a lecture by Sir Christopher Wren at Gresham College. The chapter recounts how Banks devoted his presidency to the “Scientific Service of the People.” It explores Bank's advocacy of the Baconian ideal about a strong partnership between government and science. It also highlights Banks's efforts to advance governmental patronage of science by demonstrative applications of the usefulness of science to the state's advantage.

A história do problema das colisões na física do século XVII anterior a Newton

Resumo Este trabalho traça um panorama histórico do tratamento do problema das colisões ao longo do século XVII, até que se chegasse à grande síntese mecânica de Newton. Apresentamos primeiramente as abordagens pioneiras de Thomas Harriot e Isaac Beeckman. Em seguida, passamos à tentativa de solução do problema por Descartes, apresentando resumidamente os seus fundamentos filosóficos e a construção sistemática por ele buscada, que, enfim, se mostrou errada. Passamos, então, à análise das formulações propostas por Christopher Wren, John Wallis e Christiaan Huygens, todas elas atingindo resultados corretos, ainda que de aplicação restrita. Procuramos ressaltar as particularidades de cada uma dessas elaborações, destacando a introdução pioneira na física do uso de número negativos na determinação do sentido do movimento, efetuada por Wren e Wallis, e o caráter extremamente sistêmico do pensamento mecânico de Huygens, construindo sua solução a partir da aplicação de princípios físicos fundamentais, alguns já conhecidos e outros por ele esboçados.

Indivisible

Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous Siamese Twins, make their fortune touring and settle in Mt. Airy, where they marry sisters and become prosperous slaveholders who raise lucrative crops, including tobacco. Chang’s eldest son, Christopher Wren, enlists in the 37th Virginia Cavalry at sixteen, quickly followed by Eng’s eldest, Stephen Decatur. Both are seriously wounded and Christopher is captured and imprisoned at Camp Chase, Ohio, where he survives by eating rats. Both eventually return home, but the war has ruined the family: their wealth was tied up in slaves, now free. Chang and Eng must tour again, with a disastrous outcome.