Six was from a family of Huguenot[1] refugees from the Continent who had settled in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and who had worked as silk weavers for generations.
James Six himself had trained in the family business, but by his time this was in decline because of cheap imported silks from India and Persia.[2]: p.
In 1782 The Royal Society of London published an account of the thermometer[2]: p. 51 that Six had invented two years earlier.
[citation needed] In 1784, Six was elected a Foreign Member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.[3][2]: p.
52 In 1783 he performed a number of thermometrical measurements on Canterbury Cathedral in conjunction with Sir John Cullum, who wrote about them for Philosophical Transactions in "Account of extraordinary Frost, 23 June 1783", (Philosophical Transactions, lxxiv (1784)).[2]: p.