Sir Christopher Wren and natural philosophy: with a checklist of his scientific activities

Abstract It is a commonplace that Wren’s architectural eminence has wholly eclipsed his no less important scientific activities; but this does not mean that his biographers or historians of science have been ignorant of them. John Summerson’s Sir Christopher Wren (1953), for example, devotes a chapter to Wren as scientist; Martin S. Briggs ( Wren the incomparable, 1953) is not unaware of them; and the article (1900) by F. C. Penrose in the Dictionary of national biography in many ways still gives the best account of Wren as natural philosopher. A single periodical article (I), and that selective only, gives us samples of Wren’s work, but it does not pretend to completeness or to placing Wren within the history of science. These authors, furthermore, rely on printed sources only, and have concentrated on what he did and, to a far lesser degree, on how he did it; they have said little on why. It is ironical, too, that some of their generalizations should have been based on incomplete data, which Wren himself would have deplored. The aim of the present paper is the reverse: it is to try to present as complete as possible a picture of Wren’s scientific work and to omit entirely any attempt at discussing in detail, for reasons given later, separate aspects of what he did.