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Patrick 'Ignatius' Wheatley
Patrick Wheatley was born in 1736 in Bonn, Germany. Having studied cosmology in his youth, he later directed his attention to clockwork and is perhaps best known for his contribution to the study of grandfather clocks. A renowned linguist, Wheatley was fluent in no less than four European languages and had a grasp of Arabic. Little is known of his youth, though it is said that, following a tour of Europe in his twenties, he fell in love with a flower girl in Littlehampton, England, who, myth has it, introduced Wheatley's attentions to clockwork.
Wheatley died in his his hometown of Bonn on March 14th, 1789. Though he did not live to see the French Revolution, it is said that, strongly influenced by the work of the Abbe Sieyes, this little known clockmaker wrote a pamphlet in the January of that year, advocating major changes to the French state. While a copy of Monarchy and its Discontents has been missing since the early nineteenth century, it is said that the work, while in some ways aggressive to Louis XVI and the more broader of idea of hereditary monarchy, Wheatley saw that a constitutional monarchy would be best suited to the country.
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