Who kept the first weather records, and who invented the tin opener?

We explore the curious questions that science can answer

Drops of 13th century BC Chinese wisdom (Getty/iStock)

Who kept the first weather records?

Our Eurocentric view of science and technology sometimes fails to credit the debt we owe early scientists and inventors in the east. The study of oracle bones from the Shang dynasty capital in Anyang shows that systematic meteorological records were being kept as long ago as the 13th century BC. The Anyang oracle bones also refer to rainbows, which were thought to be visible rain dragons. In the Song period, in 1070 AD, a double rainbow was described as being due to the reflection of sunlight from suspended water droplets. This was two centuries before Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, a Persian, first satisfactorily explained that, in a rainbow, light is refracted twice and reflected once through a water drop. In Europe, the use of such a simple instrument as the rain gauge only started in 1639 AD, but there were rain gauges in Korea two centuries earlier and in China in the 13th century.

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