Month: September 2012

Velvet & gold Queen Elizabeth I saddlecloth for sale

Modern(ish), Renaissance

Queen Elizabeth I was a dedicated and accomplished equestrian. She loved to hawk and hunt, and she took regular high speed rides over long distances well into her sixties. So hardcore a rider was she that she had horses imported from Ireland because her English ones weren’t fast or tough enough to withstand her usage. She rode both sidesaddle and astride, and could literally go all day, far outpacing her ladies.

It wasn’t just for exercise and fun. Her skill on horseback could be a powerful symbol of masculinity and strength as the equestrian statue had been a traditional representation of gods, heroes, kings and military leaders since at least Ancient Greece. Elizabeth was keenly aware of that and used it to her advantage, most famously at Tillbury in 1588 where she wore a silver armour chestplate and delivered a rousing gender-bending speech on horseback to her army amassed to defend against a potential land invasion from the Spanish Armada.

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm; the which, rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms, I myself will be your general, judge, and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field.

She also tapped into that symbol on occasions where the purpose was statesmanship rather than military. Every summer when London became unbearably hot, stinky and disease-ridden, the entire court would leave town and travel to different places around the country. Local nobles would have to foot the bill to host the Queen and her household, and towns would also spend masses of money to spruce themselves up for the royal visit. They also had to scare up some cash since a gift of moneys to the queen was traditional.

These visits were known as royal progresses, the ceremonial entry of a ruler into a town accompanied by processions, orations, ritual exchanges, mock battles and festivities that went on for several days. Elizabeth didn’t invent them, although she did become particularly known for them. Influenced by revived knowledge of Roman triumphs, royal progresses underscored the authority of the sovereign, the fealty owed to her by her subjects and the benevolent favor she bestowed upon them in return. The ruler approaching the city gates on horseback, escorted by a retinue on horseback and greeted by town dignitaries on horseback were key symbolic elements of the pageantry. Queens were also transported on litters to and beyond the city gates, and Elizabeth did this on occasion, but most of the time she rode her horse just as her father and her father’s father had done.

In 1574, the seafaring merchant city of Bristol was chosen for a summer progress. There was supposed to have been one four years earlier, but as time came close the city scrambled to clean up the roads near Newgate so the Queen’s large household could approach in comfort and safe from brigands. After they spent the money and repaired the roads, they found the Queen had changed her plans. They went all out, therefore, to make sure the 1574 royal visit went off without a hitch. The city corporation spent a grand total of £1,053 on preparations and supplies like sand to level the roads, cannon and two tons of gunpowder for salutes and battles, 400 infantry men and their uniforms. That works out to £183,106.17 today (bless the UK National Archives’ online historical currency converter), close to $300,000 for three days’ visit. The human cost was even greater. Ten men died and as many again suffered severe burns in gunpowder explosions the day before the Queen get there.

Here is her arrival described in Adams’s Chronicle of Bristol from 1623:

The High Crosse was new painted and gilded ; and on the 14th of August 1574 our gracious Queene Elizabeth came to this city. The mayor and all the council, riding upon good steeds, with footcloth, and pages by their sides, went to meet and received her Majesty within Lafford’s gate, where the mayor delivered the gilt mace unto Her Grace and she delivered it unto him again. And so the mayor rested kneeling before Her Grace whiles Mr. John Popham, esquire, and Recorder of this city, made an oration unto the Queene, which being ended he stood up and delivered a fair needlework purse wrought with silk and gold unto her Majesty, with 100£ in gold therein : then the mayor and his brethren took their horses, the mayor himself rode nigh before the Queene, between 2 Serjeants at arms, and the rest of the council rode next before the nobility and trumpeters, and so passed through the city….

The exchange of the mace is notable because it symbolized the town handing over its authority to the Queen and receiving it back as a gift of her graciousness. When Henry VII rode into town to assert his authority and establish relations with the city after the Battle of Bosworth, there was no exchange of the mace. The mayor kept it. The King’s visit acknowledged the town’s independence and self-government. By Queen Elizabeth’s time, things had drastically changed. The Tudor/Stuart foray into absolute monarchy would come to a (decapitated) head 80 years later in the English Civil War.

After the three days of sea battles and fort assaults, the Queen made five knights, tipped the band, and gave an elaborate quilted emerald green velvet and gold fringed saddlecloth that she had used during her visit to one of her hosts. Elizabeth had just months before enacted sumptuary laws prohibiting the wearing of velvet and gold by anyone except for a small group of aristocrats, so this was a luxurious gift indeed. The descendants of that host kept the saddlecloth in exceptionally good condition for the next 438 years, later mounting it in wood and glass for display.

I’m not sure how it was used. I wouldn’t have thought it was a saddlecloth as in a blanket that goes underneath a saddle because it has a puffy backrest. It can’t be a saddle, though some articles have called it so, because it has no ties, no stirrups, nothing at all that would keep a person attached to a moving beast. Maybe a sidesaddle pillion? If so, it’s missing a pommel and I can’t see Elizabeth riding demurely behind a man in an actual saddle on an official royal visit. Maybe the puffy part just went behind the saddle backrest as additional support. Or could it have been worn on top of the saddle? Its segmented design would make it fall well around something underneath and there’s a slit in the front center that a pommel could slide through.

Anyway, the last descendant to own it was Miles Kington, a humorist and author best known for his series of Let’s Parler Franglais books which I fondly recall lolling at when I was a kid.

Miles once revealed in a fax to his wife Caroline the dark secret behind the Kington Saddle. I’m quoting the whole thing even though this entry is already ludicrously verbose because it’s awesome. Consider it payoff for having read this far.

My dear Caroline

I sometimes worry that i may pass on to the other side before i have handed down to you the secret of the KINGTON SADDLE. Ridiculous, i know, as the doctor has said given reasonable treatment and a visit to the pub every now and then, there’s no reason why i shouldn’t last another 40 years, but nevertheless i think perhaps the time has come to tell the dread secret of the KINGTON SADDLE.

But it’s just a silly old priceless family heirloom sitting in an old glass case, i hear you laugh. There’s nothing secret about it at all…….Ah, would that be so. But this KINGTON SADDLE has been handed down through eight or nine of, maybe seventeen generations of the Kington family, all of whom are now dead. Yes, every single previous owner of the KINGTON SADDLE is now in another place, and it’s not Saudi Arabia, i’m talking about. Why do you think they were all struck down before they reached 100? Why do you think nobody ever gets the KINGTON SADDLE out and rides around on it on a horse? Why, above all, do you think nobody even wants to have it in their house, and everyone whispers furtively: “Let’s give it to cousin Laurence….. Let’s put it in a museum…..”?

I’ll tell you.

It’s because of the curse of the KINGTON SADDLE. The curse which has scattered the family far afield, from Wrexham to London, from London to Bath, and from Bath to a crazy steam railway between Keighley and Haworth only five miles long, for God’s sake. As a child i remember getting a really nasty sore throat and my father leaning over my bed and saying, “The curse of the KINGTON SADDLE has got him, we must apply the only know antidote, mother, give me a corkscrew” – yes, at the age of ten my life was saved by red wine and i have never looked back since, but that is another story.

I am surprised you have never noticed that none of the Kingtons ever rides a horse. There is a good reason for this. None of us can ever ride a horse because of the secret of the KINGTON SADDLE, and were any of us to mount a horse, it would mean instant death. For the horse. My grand-father, Major Kington, mounted a horse for the regimental race in 1907. It collapsed on the starting-line and my grand-mother lost a lot of money. My great-great-grandfather Colonel Kington took part in the charge of the Light Brigade, and had not gone 5 yards before his mount keeled over, dead, badly creasing his trousers. My great-great great
CONTINUED SOON

Sadly, the curse struck again and Miles passed away in 2008 of pancreatic cancer long before he turned 100. Now the saddlecloth is going up for auction at Dreweatts’ Arms, Medals & Militaria sale on September 26th. The explanatory fax is included in the lot. The estimated sale price is £8,000-10,000 ($13,000-$16,000). For something that once hoisted Queen Elizabeth I’s fundament on a momentous occasion and that comes with such a charming history written by a famous humorist, that seems a modest price range.

Earliest films shot in natural color digitally restored

Modern(ish)

In 1899, British photographer Edward Raymond Turner and his financier Frederick Lee patented a process for making natural color moving pictures. Color was seen in film from the very beginning. The Annabelle Serpentine Dance was filmed in Edison’s Black Maria Studios in 1895, but it was hand-tinted after the film was shot. At least three inventors had patented natural color processes before him, but Turner’s system was the first that led to a working model.

Turner had worked for still photographers since he was 15 years old. Ten years later in 1898, he worked as an assistant to photographic pioneer Frederic Eugene Ives on his newly-invented Kromskop (pronounced “chrome scope”) color still photography system. Ives’ method involved taking three black-and-white photographs on a single glass plate through red, green and blue filters. When viewed through the Kromskop device’s color filters and mirrored surfaces, those three pictures would combine into one brilliantly colored image. Ives sold prepared sets of pictures called Kromgrams for viewing through a Kromskop. These were immensely popular for Victorian audiences in Britain and the US, especially the stereoscopic model which showed the pictures in 3D as well as color. You can see some beautiful examples of Kromgrams of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake in this post.

While assisting Ives, Turner worked simultaneously on a way to take moving pictures using the three-filter additive process. What he came up with a camera that had a rotating wheel with sections of red, green and blue filters placed in front of the lens. This would record a frame of film three successive times, one in each color. Since the subjects were in motion, each frame was slightly different from the next.

The patent was the easy part. The hard part was making a working a model which would record the film and then a projector that could do the work of the Kromskop on moving pictures. After two years of failures and with money running out, in 1901 Lee and Turner went to American film producer Charles Urban who financed continuing development and enlisted engineer and camera inventor Alfred Darling to help make theory reality.

Darling built a camera that used 38mm film to record moving pictures through Turner’s filter system. They filmed a variety of test subjects — Turner’s three children playing with sunflowers in their back yard, his daughter Agnes on a swing, a goldfish in a bowl, a scarlet macaw, the Brighton pier, a street scene of Knightsbridge in London.

In 1902, Darling built a projector that would play films recorded using the Turner and Lee process. It had a speed of 48 frames per second (much faster than most black-and-white films which ran at 16 frames per second) and a lens that superimposed the red, blue and green frames simultaneously onto the screen. A rotating filter wheel behind the lens applied the proper filter color to each frame. Unfortunately, it didn’t work in practice. The timing of the rotating filters had to be exact relative to the speed of the film and the distance from the screen precisely calibrated or else the results were painfully blurry and unwatchable. They kept working on it until Edward Turner died suddenly of a massive heart attack in his workshop on March 9th, 1903. He was 29 years old.

Urban still thought the process had potential, so he brought in his associate George Albert Smith, a pioneering filmmaker and inventor, to keep developing it. Smith kept slogging at it for a while, then realized if he abandoned the blue, the remaining red and green would produce respectable color pictures with much less trouble. G.A. Smith patented the two-color system in 1906 calling it Kinemacolor. Kinemacolor cameras used rotating red and green filters to record alternating frames which were then projected through two-color filters. Here are two of G. A. Smith’s early films using the Kinemacolor process. He chose his subjects — Tartans of Scottish Clans (1906) and Woman Draped in Patterned Handkerchiefs (1908) — wisely to be particularly flush with reds and greens.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbWtviN4BG0&w=430]

Smith’s system was successful for five years. At its peak, 300 theaters in Britain had Kinemacolor projectors installed. Smith was sued for patent infringement by William Friese-Greene in 1914 who had patented a red-green system of his called Biocolour before Smith. Friese-Greene won and put Smith out of the film business for good.

In 1937, Charles Urban donated his collection of films, including the Lee & Turner test films, to the London Science Museum. Four years ago the collection was transferred to the National Media Museum where it was kept in storage until Curator of Cinematography Michael Harvey found it languishing there and decided to see if modern technology could make Turner’s colors come alive.

The first obstacle was the non-standard 38mm film size. In order to scan the frames, experts first had to create a custom gate — a devise that holds film in projectors — that would isolate a frame. They would center a frame of film in the gate, place it into an optical printer, scan the frame, and then start again with the next frame. It was a painstaking process, centering the film to ensure it’s in exactly the same position as the frame before; they topped out at 26 frames per hour.

Once the frames were scanned, the digital file was sent to Prime Focus, a special effects, conversion and restoration company, which used digital editing software to put the proper red, green or blue filter over each frame. Turner lent a hand from the grave, since he had noted which frames were which colors in the margin of the film. They used the exact process as described in the patent: that is, filter frames 1, 2 and 3, and combine them, then frames 4, 5 and 6, and combine them, etc.

Finally, they found themselves watching Edwardian color movies.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XekGVQM33ao&w=430]

The Lee and Turner films, the recording and projecting equipment are now on display at the National Media Museum in Bradford.

More about the Richard III find

Medieval, Modern(ish)

Now that the press conference is over, the University of Leicester has released a detailed statement on the find, new pictures, an excellent video illuminating the timeline of the excavation and awesomely, a five-panel artistic rendering of Richard’s death, burial and (potential) exhumation done in what I can only describe as a combination manga and stained glass style.

We start with the extensive press release. The statements from Richard Taylor and Peter Soulsby are the ones they made during the press conference. One interesting side note that I didn’t catch while live blogging is the reference to a period source for the location of Richard’s burial. Taylor quotes John Rous reporting that Richard was “at last was buried in the choir of the Friars Minor at Leicester.”

John Rous was the priest of the chapel of St. Mary Magdalen at Guy’s Cliffe which was built in 1423 by Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick. The Beauchamps were Rous’ patrons, whom he served as chaplain from around 1445 until his death in 1491. He was therefore a contemporary of King Richard III’s and may have even known him, or at least seen him, since Richard traveled to Warwick several times.

Rous was an avid antiquarian and historical researcher. He wrote a history of the Earls of Warwick between 1477 and 1485, and a history of the kings of England after 1485. The former voices strong support for the Yorkist faction, including describing Richard as a king who ruled “full commendably, punishing offenders of his laws, and oppressors of his Commons, and so cherishing those that were virtuous that he got great thank of God and love of all his subjects, both rich and poor, and great laud of the people of all other lands about him.” Once England’s political fortunes changed after Bosworth and the ascension of Henry Tudor, Rous’ description of Richard changed too. Drastically. From the Historia Regum Anglie:

“Richard of York … was retained within his mother’s womb for two years, emerging with teeth and hair to his shoulders … like a scorpion he combined a smooth front with a stinging tail. He was small of stature, with a short face and unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower….”

You can see why Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society thinks the Tudor version of Richard is a myth bearing little resemblance to reality. Philippa, incidentally, was instrumental in making this whole thing happen. She brought together the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council and helped secure funding for the dig. She’s also working with the filmmakers who have been shooting the excavation for a documentary on the search for Richard’s grave that will air on Channel 4 later this year.

The press release sheds some light on the future plans for the remains. The Very Reverend Vivienne Faull, Dean of Leicester, remarks that should the skeleton prove to be that of Richard III, he will likely be reburied in Leicester Cathedral. The cathedral will coordinate with the Royal Household and the Richard III Society to handle the remains with all proper rites and rituals.
There’s already a memorial to King Richard in the cathedral and people leave flowers there now in remembrance of the king, especially on the anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth Field.

Dr. Jo Appleby, University of Leicester Professor of Human Bioarchaeology, provides more detail on the bones themselves. She excavated them personally, donning an Outbreak-style body suit and mask to ensure there would be no contamination of the remains.

The skull had a minimum of two injuries. The first was a small penetrating wound to the top of the head that had dislodged two small flaps of bone on the skull interior. The second was a much larger wound to the occipital bone (or base of the skull): a slice had been cut off the skull at the side and back. This is consistent with a bladed implement of some sort, but further laboratory-based analysis of the bones once clean will be needed to fully understand the nature of this injury. It should be noted that this did not cut through the neck and that the skull was still in its correct anatomical position when excavated. In addition to the injuries to the skull, there was evidence of an abnormality of the spinal column. This took the form of scoliosis, or a major sideways ‘kink’ in the area of the ribcage.

His feet appear to have been destroyed at some point, probably during later construction, but the body does not appear to have been moved. It seems he was buried in a simple shroud of which no remnants have survived.

You can see Dr. Appleby hard at work in this video that is an excellent outline of how the excavation progressed. The skeleton itself is blurred, for dignity, I guess? It wouldn’t do to show a potential monarch in the osteological buff.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRY0CLRCjM8&w=430]

Now the whole epic saga in five panels drawn by Emma Vieceli, with Kate Brown working on flat colours and textures and Paul Duffield on panel borders and text. Be sure to click on each thumbnail to see the artworks in all their high res glory.

Human remains found at Richard III burial site

Medieval, Modern(ish)

The archaeologists digging under the Leicester parking lot for the Greyfriars church where King Richard III was buried in 1485 started out with a long list of ifs and maybes. They weren’t sure they had the right location for the church which had been destroyed during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1538 and built over for centuries. Even if their research on the location did turn out to be have been correct, there might be no remains left after the Tudor destruction and subsequent development. If there were physical remains of the abbey and church left to be found, they might not have found them in the two trenches they planned to dig. If they did find physical remains of the church, they might not have been sufficient to map an accurate ground plan and find the choir area where Richard was buried. If they did locate the choir area, there might be nothing there. If they did find human remains, they wouldn’t necessarily be significant since many people were buried in abbeys in churches.

Knowing how the long the odds were of discovering anything pertinent at all, the University of Leicester’s excavation team was not so much cautiously optimistic as just plain cautious. They underscored that the archaeological search would nonetheless provide a fascinating window into the long-lost history of Leicester even when/if nothing Richard-specific was discovered. It was an exercise in managing expectations, as they say in the corporate world, not just the public’s but their own.

Then something completely unexpected happened: everything went right. The two trenches immediately revealed the remains of tiled walkways which proved to be the eastern cloister walk of the friary. They found part of the wall of the chapter house abutting it. Spurred by these promising discoveries, the archaeological team dug a third unplanned trench into a neighboring parking lot and found the walls of the church within the friary.

The next discovery was more than anyone had dared hope, or at least voice. Outside of the church perimeter to the south, the team unearthed a stretch of paving made of recycled medieval tiles of different sizes and wears laid in a random pattern. They believe these are the remains of the garden of Sir Robert Herrick, mayor of Leicester. Herrick bought the abbey land in the early 1600s and built a mansion and gardens on the site. Christopher Wren, future father of the famous architect, was tutor to Herrick’s nephew. He recorded that there was a pillar on the grounds inscribed “Here lies the body of Richard III, some time King of England.”

Meanwhile, in the third trench inside the church area, archaeologists found large chunks of window tracery and a lead window H-section (part of the support for a stained glass window). There was a large window behind the high altar in the east of the church. The choir where Richard III was buried was in the east side of the church. They also found a medieval silver penny, a stone frieze they think was part of the choir stalls and copper alloy letters that might have come from tomb inscriptions.

Given these giant glaring exes marking the spot, and the huge turnout of 1,500 people who lined up to see the dig during the three hours it was open this past Saturday, the Leicester City Council agreed to extend the dig for at least one more week. It was supposed to have stopped Monday, but they couldn’t quit when they were so close, and the dig has been a huge boon for Leicester making the press all over the world.

Then, early this morning, the University of Leicester announced that human remains have been found. That’s all they said. No further details until the press conference today at 11:00 AM BST which is being tweeted live on @uniofleicester. If you don’t want to follow on Twitter, the UoL website will be posting live updates on this page. The press conference will be carried on BBC and Sky television and will be streamed live on the BBC website. I’ve tweeted Leicester to ask for a link to the live stream because I can’t find it.

Wake up, everyone! This is too exciting to sleep through. :boogie:

Okay I’m doing my own version of live updates just because I’m nerding out like a crazy person. UL is tweeting that they’ll be referring to people at the press conference using their initials so they just posted a bunch of names with their initials. One of the people listed is Dr. Turi King (TK), from UL’s Department of Genetics. Does that mean they’ve got something to DNA test?

BBC News live stream here! And it works in the US too! Head asploding!

* Richard Taylor: the search has resembled something out of a Dan Brown novel in terms of the twists and turns it has taken.

* Peter Soulsby, Mayor of Leicester went over a couple of historical highlights of the city. Thanks the public employees for giving up their parking and says given today’s announcement, they are going to have to go without their parking lot a little longer.

* Richard Buckley, co director of University of Leicester Archaeological Services, is describing the site, the layout of the trenches and what was found where.

* Richard Taylor, Director of Corporate Affairs: They have found the remains of two people: one fully articulated skeleton of an adult male found in the choir of the church and one disarticulated human skeleton, one female found in the presbytery.

* THE MALE SKELETON HAS UPON ON INITIAL EXAMINATION SUFFERED PERIMORTEM TRAUMA. BACK OF THE SKULL CLEAVED. ARROWHEAD FOUND IN THE BACK. SKELETON IN THE CHOIR HAS SPINAL ABNORMALITIES, PROBABLY FROM SCOLIOSIS, WHICH WOULD HAVE MADE HIS RIGHT SHOULDER APPEAR CONSIDERABLY HIGHER THAN HIS LEFT SHOULDER.

* Now Richard is telling me to calm the hell down because this isn’t any kind of sure thing, but it is exciting circumstantial evidence. Next up extensive testing and analysis.

* The location and modesty of the burial is in keeping with the historical sources, but the skeleton was not hunchbacked as Richard was described by Shakespeare and other sources. He was strong and appears to have died in battle. Historical sources invested physical deformity with spiritual deformity and could well have exaggerated Richard’s disability.

* Philippa Langley, lead for the Richard III society, had a dream, y’all. She says we should strive to make our dreams come true. She’s very composed, but I think she’s losing it on the inside.

* Exhumation of the male skeleton began Tuesday, September 4th.

* The archaeological site is not really display quality, so it sounds like the parking lot is going right back on top when they’re through.

* Next up is laboratory analysis at the University of Leicester. They’re hoping to recover mitochondrial DNA that can be compared to the DNA of Michael Ibsen, 17th generation nephew of Richard III. DNA analysis will take up to 12 weeks.

* Only DNA can confirm that these are the remains of Richard III. Osteology can confirm that the skeletal remains matches very well what we know of Richard from historical sources.

* The arrowhead found in the skeleton’s spine was barbed. They can’t say anything more than that right now since the find is so new. The barbed arrowhead was found between two vertebrae, not embedded in the bone.

* They haven’t cleaned the skull yet, but there are a couple of injuries to it visible. They don’t know if the head injuries or the arrow were the fatal blow. The only historical source to give details on how he died was the Ballad of Bosworth Field, widely considered unreliable. In the Ballad, Richard died of a poleaxe to the head.

* Philippa Langley thinks the Tudors constructed a mythological Richard, that to get closer to the truth of what kind of person he was, see the pre-Tudor sources from before he became king.

* She hopes the archaeology of Greyfriars will bring Richard’s story to an accurate and truthful conclusion.

And that’s all folks. Amazing. A. May. Zing.

Third original Fahrenheit thermometer surfaces

Modern(ish), Treasures

Original Fahrenheit mercury thermometerAn original mercury thermometer made by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, inventor of the mercury thermometer and creator of the temperature scale that bears his name, is going up for sale at Christie’s Travel, Science and Natural History sale in London on October 9th. This is only the third Fahrenheit thermometer known to exist today. The other two, one from 1718 and a later one from 1727, are in the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden.

Until the anonymous private collector consigned his for sale at Christie’s, the two in the museum were the only ones known to exist. The collector has had the thermometer since the 1970s but never published it or exhibited it. An original Fahrenheit mercury thermometer, the only known one in private hands, coming up for sale is therefore an immense deal. The estimated sale price is £70,000 ($112,000) to £100,000 ($160,000), but the sky’s the limit for such a rare piece.

The brass instrument is marked on both sides of the glass tube from 0 to 132 degrees Fahrenheit. The mercury and glass tube have been replaced, but the thermometer was deliberately made for those parts to be replaced when necessary. On the back is the greatest prize of them all: an inscription of “Fahrenheit Amst,” his signature and the place where the thermometer was made, i.e., Amsterdam. It actually looks like his autograph, too. It’s not just printed or engraved in generic font. Compare it to the signature on this May 7th, 1736 letter to Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who invented the binomial system of taxonomy we still use today to identify plants and animals.

Fahrenheit signature from letter to Linnaeus

Fahrenheit’s interest in scientific instruments began when he was a teenaged orphan/juvenile delinquent. Born in Danzig, now Gdansk in Poland, in 1686 to a wealthy German Hanse merchant, Fahrenheit was orphaned at 15 when his parents died from eating poisonous mushrooms. Although his father had intended he would go to university and study medicine, after his parents’ death in 1701 the city-appointed guardians of the Fahrenheit children (Daniel was the eldest of five siblings) decided he should follow in his father’s footsteps instead and keep the family business going. Daniel was an excellent student with a particular interest in science; he had zero desire to get into sales. In 1702 he was apprenticed against his will to Herman Van Beuningen of the prominent Dutch merchant family and sent to Amsterdam to learn bookkeeping and the mercantile trade.

It was during his apprenticeship that he first encountered Florentine thermometers. Invented in mid-1600s Florence by a private academy of scientists, many of them former students of Galileo, under the sponsorship and active support of Ferdinando II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, these sealed glass tubes with bulbs of wine spirits at the base were the first temperature sensors that were not also barometers affected by air pressure. They were in great demand across Europe, which is how Fahrenheit came across them in the course of learning the business.

According to a letter his guardians sent to the Mayor of Danzig four years later, Daniel got into trouble as soon as he stepped foot in Amsterdam, eventually stealing money and repeatedly running away, not to mention indulging in behaviors of such a foul nature they could not stand to describe them. According to later biographers, Fahrenheit managed to get through four years of his apprenticeship, but was already making meteorological instruments by the last years. The money his guardians claimed he stole he in fact appears to have borrowed to fund his experiments in thermometer-making. When he couldn’t repay the debt, his guardians were forced to pay it out of his inheritance.

Sick of dealing with him, his guardians decided to send him overseas with the Dutch East India Company. In 1706, they wrote to the Mayor of Danzig asking the city council to authorize a warrant for Daniel Fahrenheit’s arrest and deportation to the East Indies. In January of 1707, the Mayor complied.

Now 20 years old and with a warrant hanging over his head, Daniel moved around constantly, traveling through Germany, Sweden and Denmark, far out of reach of the authorities. In 1708, he visited Danish astronomer Ole Roemer in Copenhagen. In addition to being the first astronomer to determine the speed of light, Roemer had also worked on thermometers and devised a temperature scale of his own. The Florentine thermometers used widely varying scales. The lowest point was the coldest day in Florence during the year a given instrument was manufactured; the highest point was on the hottest day. Roemer created a fixed-point scale of 60 degrees — freezing brine was 0, boiling water was 60 — and because water froze 1/8th of the way down, divided it into eight parts of 7.5 degrees each.

Sometime after this visit, the warrant for Fahrenheit’s arrest was withdrawn. It’s possible Roemer had a hand in this, since he was not only a figure of great importance in the scientific community but also Copenhagen’s chief of the police. Fahrenheit continued his peripatetic wanderings and his experiments. His aim was to create a thermometer that was easier to manufacture, easy to calibrate and more reliable. He learned how to blow glass so he could make his own capillaries.

Ole RoemerFahrenheit was inspired by Roemer’s scale to create one of his own that was less awkwardly sectioned and with three fixed calibration points: freezing brine, freezing water and “blood heat” or body temperature. He chose to use a factor of eight rather than Roemer’s 7.5, then divided each degree into four. Multiply eight by four and you get 32. That random happenstance is how the freezing point on the Fahrenheit scale wound up being 32 degrees.

His early thermometers used wine-spirits like everyone else’s. In 1714, he managed to produce two thermometers that produced nearly identical results despite their different ranges. This was a major breakthrough. That same year he had another breakthrough when he replaced the alcohol with mercury. Quick-silver, as it was then called, expands and contracts more evenly than alcohol. It is also accurate at a wider range, allowing temperatures to be taken considerably below the freezing brine point and considerably above the boiling water point. Fahrenheit’s mercury thermometer could accurately record lower and higher temperatures and with far more fine gradations between.

You can see that on the scale of the newly-revealed thermometer which is just bristling with degree marks. There is no date on that thermometer, so we don’t know exactly when he made it. Fahrenheit published his new temperature scale in 1724, but he began to produce mercury thermometers when he settled down at his workshop in Amsterdam in 1717. He kept producing them until his sudden death from a fever during a trip to The Hague in 1736.

He was buried in a pauper’s grave in the cemetery of Kloosterkerk (Cloister Church). A commemorative plaque was installed in the church in 2002.