Tempest Prognosticator

This morning was rather wet so we went to Whitby Museum. There are some fascinating exhibits but my favourite was this (regrettably non-working) replica of a Tempest Prognosticator, designed by George Merryweather in 1850.
He was a Whitby doctor who noticed that the medicinal leech is peculiarly sensitive to the atmospheric conditions generated before an electrical storm. The prognosticator consists of 12 pint bottles set around a stand under a bell which was surrounded by 12 hammers. Each hammer was attached by a wire to a piece of whalebone placed loosely in a short metal tube on the neck of each jar. An inch and a half of water was put into each jar, along with a leech. When the leeches sensed the oncoming storm they ascended into the tubes, displacing the whalebone and causing the hammer to hit the bell. When several rings of the bell occurred this implied that a storm was imminent.

The device was constructed to look like an Indian temple with a slight Egyptian influence. It was shown at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Merryweather's hopes that the device would end up being widely used by ships were not fulfilled. (I suspect this fate met many of the clever and elaborate inventions made during the Victorian period.) The 1851 exhibit was lost but in 1951 this replica was made for the Festival of Britain, and subsequently given to the Whitby Museum.

The extra is a shot taken on the west pier; the weather was rather more blustery and cloudy than yesterday! My Editor chose this rendering of the shot which was done using the Silverefex "Pinhole" preset. I should mention however that she declined to join me on the cold windy pier while I took some photos, preferring to wait in a nice warm shop, in spite of me giving her the nice warming hug kindly suggested by Flashcube yesterday...  ;-))