The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies
304
The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies
304eBook
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Overview
An extraordinary yet little-known scientific advance occurred in the opening years of the nineteenth century when a young amateur meteorologist, Luke Howard, gave the clouds the names by which they are known to this day. By creating a language to define structures that had, up to then, been considered random and unknowable, Howard revolutionized the science of meteorology and earned the admiration of his leading contemporaries in art, literature and science.
Richard Hamblyn charts Howard’s life from obscurity to international fame, and back to obscurity once more. He recreates the period’s intoxicating atmosphere of scientific discovery, and shows how this provided inspiration for figures such as Goethe, Shelley and Constable. Offering rich insights into the nature of celebrity, the close relationship between the sciences and the arts, and the excitement generated by new ideas, The Invention of Clouds is an enthralling work of social and scientific history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780330537308 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pan Macmillan |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Richard Hamblyn was born in 1965 and is a graduate of the universities of Essex and of Cambridge, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the early history of geology in Britain. He lives and works in London.
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
The Useless Pursuit of Shadows
"Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?"
"I love clouds . . . drifting clouds . . . there . . . over there . . . marvelous clouds."
Charles Baudelaire, 1862
At six o'clock one evening in December 1802, in a dank and cavernous laboratory in London, an unknown young amateur meteorologist untied a bundle of handwritten pages, carefully balanced a roll of watercolor drawings beside his chair, and prepared himself to speak on a subject curiously at odds with his subterranean surroundings. It was a cold evening, colder still in the basement of the old building in Plough Court, and as the young man rose to address his audience, answering the supportive smiles of one or two of his friends, his slight shiver might have been due to the cold as much as to anticipation.
He was dressed simply, in an unadorned black coat and a high white collar — the young urban Dissenter's badge of plainness — and his reticent demeanor spoke of a natural modesty as well as trepidation. He could never, of course, have imagined that the evening was to make him famous, and as he cleared his throat and stared at the title of his lecture, "On the Modifications of Clouds," there was nothing in the air to suggest that his life was about to change.
The usual discomforts of public speaking would have been worse for a Quaker, and worse still for one as self-doubting and preoccupied as the 30-year-old chemist Luke Howard. Howard knew that his talents were not of the incendiary kind. They were not those of the flamboyant young Cornishman Humphry Davy, for example, whom he had recently met and whose rising fame as a scientific speaker told loudly of the worldly rewards of masculine looks and self-assurance. But Howard, whose mild hazel eyes peered out from his slender and serious face, at least felt himself to be largely among friends. Perhaps it would strike him later how unlikely his situation looked as a candidate for legend: there he was, an unknown speaker in an inauspicious room, the very subject of whose talk was new and untested. The subject was so new, indeed, that it had no defining term. Depending on how his ideas were received, the study of clouds might be hailed by his audience as a new and necessary branch of natural philosophy. Or if things went wrong that evening, as he suspected they might, the enterprise itself might be dismissed in its entirety as a useless pursuit of shadows.
Most pioneers are at the mercy of doubt at the beginning, whether of their worth, of their theories, or of the whole enigmatic field in which they labor. Luke Howard was no exception. His hesitations, however, were beginning to attract the notice of the room. He registered an expectant silence among his audience, and someone from the blank of faces nodded at him to start. Some of the older audience members and their guests, after all, had to be over at Somerset House by eight o'clock that same evening, for the start of the more prestigious meeting at the rooms of the Royal Society (and of course for the excellent three-course dinner that would be served to them afterward in the dining room). They would have been in no mood to find themselves delayed by the hesitations of an unknown amateur cloud watcher.
But little did they know how they would continue to speak of the evening before them for years to come, or how that coming hour would live so long and so vividly in their memories. For they had been there when Luke Howard spoke; they had been there at the unfolding of an epoch.
As unaware as the audience of what fortune held for his future, Luke Howard took a deep and steadying breath and, like a listener at a spoken recital, heard from afar his own quiet voice recounting the opening words of his address:
My talk this evening concerns itself with what may strike some as an uncharacteristically impractical subject: it is concerned with the modifications of clouds. Since the increased attention which has been given to meteorology, the studies of the various appearances of water suspended in the atmosphere is become an interesting and even necessary branch of that pursuit. If Clouds were the mere result of the condensation of vapour in the masses of atmosphere which they occupy, if their variations were produced by the movements of the atmosphere alone, then indeed might the study of them be deemed a useless pursuit of shadows, an attempt to describe forms which, being the sport of winds, must be ever varying, and therefore not to be defined. But the case is not so with clouds . . .
And as the hour wore on to the sound of Howard's voice, a singular journey began, a journey that would lift an unknown speaker from a chemical factory located in a courtyard off Lombard Street, ECI, up into the realms of scientific and romantic celebrity. It is an hour to be remembered by historians and daydreamers alike, for by the end of his lecture Luke Howard, by giving language to nature's most ineffable and prodigal forms, had squared an ancient and anxiogenic circle.
For by the end of his lecture Luke Howard had named the clouds.
*Endnotes were omitted
Copyright © 2001 Richard Hamblyn
Table of Contents
| List of Illustrations | ix | |
| Prologue: The Useless Pursuit of Shadows | 1 | |
| 1 | The Theatre of Science | 4 |
| 2 | A Brief History of Clouds | 15 |
| 3 | The Cloud Messenger | 33 |
| 4 | Scenes from Childhood | 40 |
| 5 | The Askesian Society | 62 |
| 6 | Other Classifications | 90 |
| 7 | Publication | 112 |
| 8 | Growing Influence | 141 |
| 9 | Fame | 166 |
| 10 | The Beaufort Scale | 184 |
Interviews
An Interview with Richard Hamblyn
Barnes & Noble.com: In reading The Invention of Clouds I was particularly struck by the phenomenon of science as blockbuster entertainment in the early 1800s. It seems that people of all walks of life shared in these scientific spectacles. Would you compare these with today's major motion pictures showing off the latest technology?
Richard Hamblyn: Well, yes and no. There certainly was a sense that new ideas in science and technology were being offered up as entertainment to 18th- and 19th-century audiences, complete with props, explosions, and other theatrical effects; but behind this lay a real desire to communicate recent breakthroughs as important and stimulating things in themselves. Contemporary cinema, while certainly engaging in the spectacle of new scientific ideas, exploring themes such as genetics, theories of consciousness, or the Internet, often with great panache, is really out to entertain rather than inform. What is comparable to Howard's intellectual environment, though, is something like the Discovery Channel, where ideas really are brought to life for a mass audience. The high profile of popular science books, too, attests to the same kind of appetite for science that marked the turn of the 19th century. I think that much of the 20th century saw a turning away from science and technology in the popular imagination, particularly after the Second World War; but I think that we are seeing a return to a more balanced way of thinking about scientific ideas. We still have reservations about what are seen as the darker recesses of research, such as genetically modified foods, but even critics of science are seeking to become more informed about it. This must be a good thing.
B&N.com: One of Luke Howard's breakthroughs was to classify forms for the archetype of constant change -- namely clouds. Can you tell us a little about how concepts of an ever-changing nature were being formed during this time period?
RH: The idea that nature could be classified at all was of course an ancient one, but its emphasis strengthened from time to time during the modern era; the work of the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné (Linneaus) really laid the groundwork for modern classification, but his system seemed to reflect a static view of the world; one in which organisms took their place in a stately, unchanging universe. This was clearly problematic for many thinkers who came after him. One of them, Buffon, devised a different way of thinking about taxonomy, which embraced organisms' capacities to change, and his transitional work really influenced later scientific workers such as Darwin, Lamarck, and Howard (although it was Linneaus's binomial classification system that really caught on as a way of describing natural objects and which we still use today). And in the wider culture, changeability was also a byword. Romantic figures such as Coleridge, Shelley, Goethe, and Constable, all perceived nature to be an infinitely mobile thing. Goethe in particular saw the world to be in a state of constant flux, where there was never a moment of rest; Shelley's poem "Mutability," too, became a kind of Romantic catchphrase; while in "The Prelude," Wordsworth traced the huge changes that mark the life of a single consciousness; and so one of the reasons that Howard's work became so celebrated by his contemporaries was because it chimed so well with these wider preoccupations. The naming of clouds was a piece of Romantic science. It reflected the times in which it occurred, while also helping to define them.
B&N.com: I liked your story of how the modest Luke Howard couldn't believe at first that Goethe had taken such an interest in him, even writing poems based on his work. Would you comment on the relationship between science and the arts that existed then?
RH: The turn of the 19th century was a time of extraordinary intellectual activity; and one of these activities was the professionalization of intellectual life; we begin to see the rise of the specialist -- the man or woman who does only one thing confidently, and who, over time, learns to grow suspicious of neighboring disciplines. This was simply not the case in the middle of the previous century. A mid-18th-century intellectual would have regarded just about everything as fit for his or her attentions and would not have understood the idea that, say, geological interests were incompatible with archaeological, literary, botanical, painterly, or mathematical interests. This notion, though, began to gain ground, particularly with the rise of professional bodies and specialized learned societies at the time. Goethe was one of the last great European figures who regarded the entire sweep of natural and man-made phenomena as his chosen topic. He witnessed the rise of the specialist and he resisted it. For him, as for earlier figures, all the arts and all the sciences were part of the same range of imaginative, emotional, and intellectual responses to the world around him. Why seek to separate them out? Howard's essay and his own cloud poems sought to evoke and explain the drama of the skies. So why worry that one was "scientific" and the other "literary?" And why accord these arbitrary terms such divisive respect? Goethe has many supporters of this view now, and I am one of them, but we cannot escape the fact that two centuries of specialization has changed the intellectual landscape utterly. The mutual mistrust that we see now between science intellectuals and arts/humanities intellectuals is the worst thing that we have inherited from the enlightenment era, and one of the most interesting things that emerged from my research on Howard was encountering the seeds of this mistrust growing all around him. He lived through this period of transformation, and his career offers us a great example of a successful dialogue between the sciences and the arts.
B&N.com: Is there anything else you would like to add?
RH: One of the things that I liked most about Luke Howard was his natural diffidence and modesty. The idea that someone might shun celebrity is, nowadays, almost unthinkable; yet he found his elevation to a lionized scientific figure very difficult to deal with. I've tried to capture his personality in the pages of the book, but, of course, his shyness and deliberately low profile contributed to making that part of the job much harder. Yet I felt that his contribution to international science deserved to be much better known than it was, and I hope that others will come to share my real admiration for the man who named the clouds, and who gave us an entire language with which to contemplate and celebrate the sky.