Copley Lecture: The Great Frost of 1708/09: Thermometers and Representations of Climate Disruption

The “Great Frost,” to the French, “Le Grand Hiver,” of 1708/09 brought three months of unbearable cold. Lakes and rivers froze, animals died. Agriculture was wiped out—the wheat harvest devastated—and trees exploded. Travelers were found frozen to death on roads. In homes, many awoke to find their nightcaps frozen to their beds or to find family members frozen to death, impossible to move because they were frozen into their bedsheets. Frozen bread required an axe to break it.

Climatologists today confirm that the Great Frost, which occurred during the Little Ice Age, was in fact the coldest winter in Europe in the last 500 years, with temperatures hitting lows of -12 C and -15 C. But how were these temperatures experienced and understood in the eighteenth century?

In this talk, the Great Frost presents an occasion to think about climate disruption and its representation. Drawing upon the philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s model of biocentrism, I argue that William Derham’s accounts in Philosophical Transactions, among the earliest meteorological observations in England, and the newly developing scientific instrument of the thermometer, particularly the fictions of measurement, mastery, and scale advanced by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit’s mercury-in-glass thermometer, teach us new questions about how knowledge is produced, and also about new forms of social relations across space and time.

Professor Chico's lecture will be followed by a reception.