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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
