Notes

I will welcome comments and corrections at chrishill197@googlemail.com. Versions of this article are with NIFHS, the Royal Meteorological Society, the Kipling Society and the Ballynure Historical Group.

[1] In the records of Ballyeaston First Presbyterian Church the dates of baptism (not necessarily birth) for the children of John Hill and Eliza Clements are: Sarah 17 August 1843, Jane 11 June 1847, Samuel Alexander 10 October 1851, and Margaret 18 April 1857. Mary Hill is baptised 19 January 1841 as a daughter of John Hill and Elizabeth Clemens. David Hill is baptised 3 January 1854 as a son of John Hill and Elizabeth Clements. All are presumably in the same family.

[2] Edmonia’s memoir is written from Beaver, Pennsylvania, in May 1892 under the name “Edna Taylor Hill”, and I refer to it as [ETH]. She gives 10 October 1851 as Alec’s date of birth, with no mention of baptism and no stated source. She says nothing about John Hill or others in Alec’s family, but presumably met them. For example she paused en route from America back to India in late 1889, and Pinney suggests the obvious:

Mrs Hill’s diary records that after she landed at Liverpool on 4 October she went to Belfast (presumably to see her husband’s family) before going on to London, where she arrived on 12 October.

[3]

[4] Nineteenth Report of the Science and Art Department (London, 1872). The other winners were Walter Saise of Bristol and John Milne of Hounslow.

[5] Saise became a senior official in Indian collieries, a mining expert, and a Bristol city councillor. He and Alec appear as prospective members in the Chemical Society proceedings of 18 February 1875.

[6] Robert Gascoyne-Cecil (1830-1903), the third Marquess, had been reappointed as Secretary of State for India in 1874 and would be three times Prime Minister.

[7] Sir John Strachey (1823-1907) was lieutenant-governor (from April 1874 to July 1876) when Alec was appointed. His brother Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Strachey (1817-1908) was the “Gen. Strachey” above, from the India Office, who asked about a potential professor. These two continued a family tradition of service to the Empire and India. Sir Auckland Colvin was lieutenant-governor (November 1887 to November 1892) when Alec died; Edmonia quotes his praise of Alec at length.

After 1877 there was a merger and the full title was Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Chief Commissioner of Oudh. These provinces on and near the Ganges plain were named for being NW of Bengal. Allahabad was some 900 miles (and even Simla was some 300 miles) from the “northwest frontier” with Afghanistan, which during Alec’s Indian years remained an important military and diplomatic flashpoint.

[8] Of his non-scientific life in London and India before 1883, and any amours before or outside marriage, Edmonia may have known more; she talked or wrote to fellow-students and friends of both Alec and Kipling, but I have not personally consulted her diaries or the Cornell archive. The Ballynure historians to whom I have spoken know of no surviving family correspondence.

[9] Approved leave of absence was more strictly called “civil leave”, with “furlough” reserved for the military. A long recuperative break, usually taken out of India, was customary after several years of service. About Alec’s extension, which covered his return to America and marriage, the Pioneer says that HM’s Secretary of State for India, on 21 March, has granted 5 months’ furlough; the Times of India says 5; the Abbeville Press and Banner says 6.

[10] Nature (20 March 1884) noted the January 1884 Annalen paper: Messungen der Sonnenwärme; von O. Fröhlich. Alec then referred to it in his 1886 RMS paper "Professor Langley's researches on solar heat", printed in the 1887 Quarterly Journal; see the article on Thomas Collyns Simon on this site.

[11] Grindlay & Co. of 55 Parliament-street in London were “agents and bankers to the British army and business community in India”.

[12] Letter to Ralph Abercromby, 15 December 1887.

[13] Nature, 11 October 1877. See below for sunspots and climatology.

[14] Blanford says in the Report for 1881-82:

Edmonia writes of the University “the tower which the Mahárája of Vizianagram gave, and which is two hundred feet high, was speedily utilized by Mr. Hill for meteorological observations” [ETH]. William Emerson’s extensive work in India included the Crawford Market in Bombay (Mumbai). Kipling’s artist-curator father John Lockwood Kipling contributed its decorative designs, and in Lahore met Ruchi Ram Sahni (see below) at art classes.

Kipling senior shed some light on “furloughs” when in 1890 he asked for 18 months and met red tape: “The Accountant-General observes that, as Mr Kipling never fulfilled the condition specified in Article 332(ii) of the Civil Service Regulations, it is not clear how he was admitted to the more favorable leave rules for uncovenanted officers…”. In the course of 11 pages of letters, notes and reconsiderations, the Accountant-General’s report, which calculated an entitlement of 7 months and 8 days after applying inter alia Articles 332(ii), 337 and 338(a), is described as “curiously inaccurate”.

[15] The work of Theodore Schubart (1835-1899) is briefly described and illustrated by M Dorikens and L Dorikens-Vanpraet: “Three 19^th century instrument makers at the University of Ghent, Belgium”, Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, no. 53, pp. 9-14 (1997). The town name Ghent may be written Gent in Flemish and Gand in French.

[16] Van Rysselberghe spent much time at conferences and exhibitions, demonstrating his meteorological and telephonic instruments, and writing for extra funds to the Observatory’s Director, Jean-Charles Houzeau de Lahaie (1820-1888), a colourful journalist, abolitionist and astronomer.

[17] The types of battery mentioned were familiar in the 1870s. Heinrich Meidinger’s variant of the old Daniell design used a glass cell with copper sulphate. Georges Leclanché (French, but sometime domiciled in Belgium) developed more powerful zinc-carbon cells. Initially based on porous pots, they were gradually improved as precursors of dry-cell batteries, and Van Rysselberghe favoured them for telegraphy and telephony.

Van Rysselberghe stressed that the secondary and central devices would be à mouvement isochrone. He invented several mechanical regulators whose weights were intended to move on not-quite-circular arcs. His parabolic-path approximation (1878) was clever but overcomplicated, so he settled for an ellipse (1880).

[18] Blanford’s correspondent Abercromby, classifier of clouds and author of the 1887 textbook Weather, saw a Van Rysselberghe recorder at Tokyo Observatory during his 1885-86 travels.

[19] Thomas Holbein Hendley (1847-1917) was a Surgeon-Major (later Colonel), Inspector-General of Hospitals, and art historian. His article on Indian Museums (Journal of Indian Art and Industry, 1914), at first glance plodding and footnote-heavy, mentions many non-Indian museums and the Ghent International Exhibition. He lists his experience:

He writes of Lahore Museum (where Lockwood Kipling arranged a special exhibit on tobacco pipe history):

His Conclusions include:

The printed Plans of Jaipur Museum show a prominent room for “Scientific Appliances”.

[20] Jaipur in Rajasthan had a first-class meteorological Observatory and a Maharajah. Its famed astronomical Observatory dated from the early seventeenth century. Confusion is hard to avoid, as Jeypur and Jeypore also appear, and there is another Jeypore with another Maharajah in Odisha near the east coast. Hendley, the Jeypore / Jaipur museum, and the old Observatory are mentioned in Kipling’s Letters of Marque. Alec, in India for most of 1875-1890, missed various European museum and salon exhibitions of industry, arts and Impressionism, but From Sea to Sea has:

[21] Draper was one of a considerable scientific family, together covering many areas of chemistry, astronomy, meteorology and education. The American Meteorological Journal (vol. I, 1884-1885) published his illustrated description of his “self-recording mercurial barometer” (which was also temperature-compensated), and listed:

When the “Loan Exhibition” form of publicity was adopted in New England after the RMS example (see above), Draper company instruments were prominent. Draper’s New York observatory was in Belvedere Tower (formerly a lookout); Alec’s observatory was in the garden of Belvedere, his villa; in Calcutta, Belvedere House and its estate were occupied by the Lieutenant-Governor and Viceroy. It was a common name.

[22] Compare Alec’s experience and his “a matter of doubtful expediency” with the February 1875 RMS discussion: Mr SYMONS said that, among the many advantages which this instrument possessed, he considered the getting rid of the transcription of observations one of the greatest.

[23] Ciel et Terre, vol. 56, pp. 459-473 (1939).

[24] John Tyndall and Alec (after some exchanges in the journals) reached similar conclusions about the absorption of the sun’s rays by the Earth’s atmosphere (see I M McCabe, “The atmospheric science of John Tyndall (1820-1893)”, Ph.D. thesis, University College London, 2012). Tyndall’s colleagues on the high-calibre Committee of the 1876 Loan Exhibition included Balfour Stewart, Clerk Maxwell, Huxley, Rayleigh, Story-Maskelyne, Strachey and Wheatcroft.

[25] Théo (1862-1926) showed little interest in labels such as impressionist (plain, post-, or neo-), divisionist and pointillist. His portraits include The Children of François Van Rysselberghe. The changing nuances of Van, van, Von and von also mattered in Belgium and France.

[26] Around this time Archibald was experimenting with anemometers on kites (see Folie’s remarks above on Van Rysselberghe), and using high-tensile steel piano wire instead of flax kite string. The dating of the first useful images from kiteborne cameras is disputed.

[27] S A Hill, The Life Statistics of an Indian Province (Nature, 12 July 1888). Sunspots and Prices of Indian Food-Grains by his colleague Frederick Chambers (misprinted here as “E. Chambers”) had appeared in Nature in June 1886.

[28] Norman Lockyer, W W Hunter and E D Archibald, “The cycle of sun-spots and of rainfall in southern India”, submitted to the Indian Famine Commission, 1879. Archibald’s review article “Cyclical periodicity in meteorological phenomena” (American Meterological Journal, vol. VII, pp. 289-295, 1890) is explicit about the difficulties of hunting for repetitive cycles in noisy data, and about the claim that Archibald and Hill jointly and simultaneously hypothesised and confirmed a sunspot-rainfall correlation for Northern India “which has since been established by Professor Hill on more extended data”. See also Alec’s letter “Atmospheric pressure and solar heat” in Nature, vol. 19, p. 432, and the Amrita Bazar Patrika of 16 August 1876. Many others including Richard Strachey were also involved in sunspot analysis, with prominent contributions from Germany and South Africa. Archibald has sweeping proposals for a well-staffed bureau (“with an intelligent head to initiate and control”) to gather and analyse all existing records.

[29] Gilbert Walker (1868-1958) succeeded John Eliot (Blanford’s successor) in 1904 as chief of the Indian Meteorology Department. All fought to expand their mini-empires with more staff and especially more trained Assistants. Symons’s Magazine in 1878 could hardly believe that Blanford, even with numerous helpers, had personally supervised the hundreds of pages of memoirs and Reports. One reason was that, with full acknowledgement, large sections by Alec were included.

Walker’s appointment caused mild surprise, but he brought expertise in the mathematical physics of boomerangs and golf, and was a useful flautist, watercolourist and ice-skater (see J M Walker’s “pen portrait” in Weather, vol. 52, pp. 217-220, 1997).

“Yule-Walker” equations appear in the mathematics of autoregressive processes. George Udny Yule (1871-1951) was the son of George Udny Yule (1813-1886, a civil servant in Bengal) and the nephew of Robert Yule (1817-1857, killed in the Mutiny at Delhi).

[30] The long history of Indian rainfall statistics has been revisited by e.g. Sontakke et al., “Instrumental period rainfall series of the Indian region (AD 1813—2005): revised reconstruction, update and analysis”, The Holocene, vol. 18, 2008.

[31] Letter of 23 April 1890, from 18 Grosvenor Street, St Helier, Jersey, to the Secretary to the Government of India.

[32] Sir John Eliot, 28 August 1890, four weeks before Alec’s death:

[33] Jacques Bernaert, one of Schubart’s predecessors at the University of Ghent, built calibrated tubs for water / alcohol / oil experiments on surface tension by Joseph Plateau (1801-1883).

[34] And here it is. Symons’s Magazine of May 1900 mentioned Alec’s elephants and horses but shed no light on their calibration. Vague or unquantified anemometric “units” can be useful and generally understood. Golfers assess very localised wind variations in often complex terrain and take one club, two clubs etc. more (or less) than usual: see Remote Sensing, March 2018; www.mdpi.com/2072-4292/10/3/466. More generally Alec studied many topics with close parallels in modern anemometry and wind energy: the need to choose sites with attention to nearby building and other obstructions; the associated appreciation that as one nears ground level the mean wind speed tends to decrease but the fluctuations and turbulence tend to increase, so that without careful checking and corrections the results from several instruments at different heights may be inconsistent; the detection and tracking of atmospheric vortices (though Indian cyclones and aircraft trailing vortices have vastly different scales); and actinometry and photography, which concern infrared and visible optics. Alec would contribute fully as a modern-day scientist, and tut at our slapdash laboratory and field practices.

The RMS (with its “Wind Force Committee”) paid attention to different designs of anemometers and the battle for robustness and accuracy. Meteorologists were candid about the problems of anemometer performance in light winds (they struggle to get going), strong winds (they suffer damage), and variable winds (they need different calibration factors in different conditions). Today’s wind scientists will sigh with recognition. The 1882 Quarterly Journal contains much information about the great gale of October 1881, the damage caused across Britain, and the drawbacks of contemporary instruments.

[35] Richard Wallace, The Craigs of Ballyboley (Ballynure Historical Group, 2017).

[36] “Lal(a)”, or “Lalla” in the reports, can be an endearment or title, often for a tutor or elder brother; Ruchi Ram Sahni’s granddaughter (interviewed age 100) said “All of his family called him Lalaji”. See www.indiaofthepast.org.

[37] N K Sehgal and Subodh Mahanti, eds, Memoirs of Ruchi Ram Sahni, New Delhi, 1994; Debi Prasad Chattopadhyaya, History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: pt. 1. Science, technology, imperialism and war, pp. 387-401, Pearson Education India, 1999.

[38] That is, John Campbell Oman (1841-1911), professor of Natural Science at the Government College, the J. C. Oman in the staff list. He helped Ruchi Ram Sahni and was an influential educator. He and other professors and Reporters (including Alec’s colleagues Boutflower, Chambers and Thomson) complained about pay and prospects, often citing special circumstances or alleged promises. Oman had no joy in 1887:

But he gained a personal allowance of Rs. 100 per month in 1889. He also wrote on Indian mystics and ascetics (as did Ruchi Ram Sahni) but is not to be confused with John Wood Oman the Presbyterian theologian.

[39] Other minor misprints are silently corrected in these extracts from the online version of Ruchi Ram Sahni’s memoir.

[40] From 10 December 1884 to 10 March 1885, says the Report extract above.

[41] For a similar linking of the stories of William Steel Dickson of Carnmoney, and his emigrant relatives in Greeneville, Tennessee, see North Irish Roots, vol. 27, no. 2, 2016.

[42] The Rev. David Hill McMurtry (1829-1907). His brothers Robert and Alexander Hay Hill McMurtry visited their Hill cousins in South Carolina. A H H McMurtry (1843-1914) graduated M.D. in June 1865; in 1912, from his Crumlin Road home, he sent a plainspoken letter to R E Hill, who had it printed in the Press and Banner (as Alec’s 1886 letter had been printed – see below). J B Ismay, chairman of the White Star line, was being vilified for saving himself as their flagship Titanic sank. R E Hill (now, over 70, a distinguished judicial oldtimer) had defended him in print. McMurtry agreed (Ismay had done all he could and waited till the last moment before joining the lifeboat), then went a step further: “I fail to see the wisdom or necessity or justification of sacrificing more valuable lives for less valuable. Better that ten women and children had been drowned than saved at the cost of one life like Mr. Stead’s”. W T Stead, a well-known campaigning journalist, was one of the drowned.

[43] Mary Hill married Thomas Wilson and died in Straid in 1894. Their children included a doctor and a solicitor, continuing the “Gilmer Hill” name from David Hill’s wife Jane Gilmer (Gilmour, Gilmore etc.), the eldest daughter of John Gilmer of Rashee. These “Abbeville” letters preserved in PRONI and other libraries are useful for many passing mentions of other emigrants and of Ballynure friends and families, such as Beggs, Bell, Buchanan, Devenn(e)y, Dollar (in Ogdensburg far to the north), Fullarton, Hamilton, Harbison (Harbeson etc.), Hawthorn, Hay, Houston, Irwin (Erwin), McIlwain(e), McMurtry, Murdoch (Murdock), Smith (Smyth), Thompson (in Charleston), Young, Weir, and Wilson.

There were many Hill families in this part of Antrim, with no shortage of Samuels. Alec was narrowly outlived by my great-great-grandfather Samuel Hill latterly of Carnmoney (1797-1892), and by Samuel Hill who wandered from Dunturkey / Skilganaban in 1891 and was found dead in a Ballyalbanagh field “which is in the direction deceased would go if going to a farm his family hold at Ballyboley”.

[44] There were 16 annas to a rupee.

[45] Louis Menand, New Yorker 8 January 2018, referencing McAdam and Kloos (2014).

[46] I do not see that Alec played cricket, but there are well-known precedents for “standing down” a first-class umpire from a match involving his son (in those days always “his” and “son”): for fear, not of favouritism, but of its reverse.