A history of rain gauges

✍ Scribed by Ian Strangeways

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 50 KB
• Volume: 65
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0043-1656
• DOI: 10.1002/wea.726

✦ Synopsis

In his letter to the Editor in the September 2010 issue of Weather, Brian Giles (2010) describes a rain gauge by Abraham Follett Osler that was operated in Edgbaston, Birmingham, and in Plymouth, in the 1830s. Brian mentions that I omitted this from my article on the history of rain gauges (Strangeways, 2010). The history of rain gauges is replete with so many different designs that it would be impossible to mention more than a fraction of them. Instead I had space only to describe the general types, such as float-operated, weighing and various electrical types of gauge. Anyone who would like to marvel at the ingenuity of the hundreds of designs of gauge that proliferated in the 19th and early 20th centuries can do no better than to look at the report I referred to by John C. Kurtyka (1953). Googling the reference takes you to a full copy of the report; not, however, to Osler's instrument probably because it measured both rain and wind. In a public park in the north of England as a boy I would watch through the window of a substantial Victorian 'shed' as massive levers driven by great vanes on the roof via stout rods moved a pen across a chart. It may have recorded rain too, I don't remember, but it was certainly heavy engineering, in keeping with the coal mines round about and Rugby League on cold foggy Saturdays.