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The Diary
Itself and the Transcripts
The diary was
written in a surveyor’s field notebook with tables already printed
for latitude, longitude and meteorological observations. In the
section for the date, the year ‘186’ was pre-printed and Wills inserted
‘1’ after it in most cases where he recorded weather data. The left
hand column, for times, followed the nautical tradition, with hours
starting at 1 after midday, instead of midnight.
Wills refers
to two scales in his measurement of temperatures: Reaumur (sometimes
spelt as Reaumer in his diary) and Fahrenheit. The former is named
after the French scientist Rene Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur (1683–1757).
He fixed the freezing point of water at 0o and the boiling
point at 80o. This temperature scale is no longer in
use, unlike Fahrenheit, which is still used in some parts of the
world. The German scientist Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1734) designed
the mercury thermometer in 1724. On the Fahrenheit scale, the freezing
point of water is 32o and the boiling point is 212o.
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