[potato3732842]

>It's also worth noting that reliable daily temperature records only go back to the late 1800s. The way you know this is that there are no record highs or lows in 1788 or even 1828. Most likely, at least some of the real records were set prior to the invention of temperature measurement.

There's a whole meta-genre of academic papers that consist of taking unreliably measurement logs from prior centuries, comparing them to what the current best scientific understanding of the field is and then saying "aha, X wasn't mistaken about observing/measuring/concluding Y in conditions/location Z, his instrumentation was likely out of tune by a factor of N, if we re-do his math with the following error bars and plot the results you can see that what he reported is within the limits of our understanding of the subject today".

I'm not gonna say it's useful or useless science, but it sure is interesting to find out how close to modern understanding some of those guys back then were within their niches if you account for the quality of their equipment despite sometimes very unscientific conditions.