Today is the tercentenary of the death of John Tulley of Saybrook, Connecticut, U.S. Of course this news, cause for sombre remembrance or celebration though it well may be, is unlikely to plunge readers of this column into spasms of uncontrollable grief, nor yet have them penning odes of joyful thankfulness for Tulley's life.
But spare a thought for this man today; he is thought by some to have been the United States' first public weatherman.
Tulley was born in England in 1638, and his family emigrated to the New World when he was about 10 years old. He acquired some erudition, and made his living for many years in Saybrook as a teacher of mathematics, navigation and astronomy. But he decided to make his talents available to a wider audience, and in 1687 the first edition of Tulley's Almanac hit the 17th-century equivalent of news-stands.
The almanac was not unlike our own Old Moore. It included bits and scraps of all kinds of useful and quite useless information, like the times of sunrise and the phases of the moon, tide predictions, currency conversions and distances from A to B by road. But it also included predictions of the weather, modestly described by Tulley himself as "prognosticks of tempests, of winds, of rain, of fair weather, and of the eclipses".
Although it is not entirely clear what methods Tulley may have used to formulate his forecasts, the 1688 edition gives a clue: "What is hinted about the weather," he says, "is guessed at from the signs, the planets and their aspects; ancient writers have been often deceived about the weather, and there I do desire a charitable censure concerning it" - all of which raises more questions than it really answers.
Displaying a resignation with which many of today's practitioners would sympathise, he goes on to say that he uses "the common rules of meteorology, which I have as often found to fail as to hit right, for the only wise and allknowing God, that created the heaven and the earth and the sun and moon and stars, many times doth so order it that all signs shall fail".
But what John Tulley's forecasts may have lacked in accuracy, they gained in the novelty of their conveyance: April, for example, he describes as "a very fickle month, and therefore no more like a constant month than is an apple like an oyster".
There were 16 Tulley's Almanacs in total. The last one, prepared by him just before his death on October 5th, 1701, was published posthumously under the fitting title of Tulley's Farewell.