The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies

424 Pages·2011·44.466 MB·

by  Richard Hamblyn

Invention
of
Sausalito
Public
Library
L
U.S.A. $27-00
The early years of the nineteenth century saw an intriguing
yet little-known scientific advance catapult a shy young
Quaker to the dizzy heights of fame. The Invention of
Clouds tells the extraordinary story of an amateur meteo¬
rologist, Luke Howard, and his groundbreaking work to
define what had hitherto been random and unknowable
structures—clouds.
In December 1802, Luke Howard delivered a lec¬
ture that was to be a defining point in natural history and
meteorology. He named the clouds, classifying them in
terms that remain familiar to this day: cirrus, stratus,
cumulus, and nimbus. This new and precise nomenclature
sparked worldwide interest and captured the imaginations
of some of the century’s greatest figures in the fields of art,
literature, and science. Goethe, Constable, and Coleridge
were among those who came to revere Howard’s vision of
an aerial landscape. Legitimized by the elevation of this
new classification and nomenclature, meteorology fast
became a respectable science.
(continued on back flap)
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Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/inventionofcloudOOhamb
The Invention of Clouds

The Invention Clouds
of
How
an Amateur Meteorologist
Forged the Language of the Skies
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York IOOO3
Copyright © 2001 by Richard Hamblyn
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Flamblyn, Richard, 1965—
The invention of clouds : how an amateur meteorologist forged the language of the
skies / Richard Hamblyn.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-374-17715-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
I. Clouds. 2. Meteorology—England—History—19th century. 3- Howard, Luke,
1772—1864. 4- Meteorologists—England—Biography. I. Title.
QC921 .H35 2001
55i-57'6—dc2i
00-068189
Designed by Lynn Buckley
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reproduce the following:
Fig. I: Cirrus, in the engraved version of Luke Howard’s original drawing, from Luke Howard, On the Modifications of Clouds, 1804, by
permission of the British Library, BL I393-h-l6.(l). Fig. 2: The street cloud seen by Hayman Rooke from the window of his study,
from Hayman Rooke, A Continuation of the Annual Meteorological Register, kept at Mansfeld Woodhouse, 1802, by permission of the British Li¬
brary, BL 08756.b.49.(2-). Figs. 3 and The Plough Court laboratory in a nineteenth-century photograph, c. i860, and No. 2
Plough Court, Lombard Street, c. 1840, reproduced with kind permission of Glaxo Wellcome pic, Greenford, U.K. Fig. 6: "A
Balloon Prospect from Above the Clouds,” from Thomas Baldwin, Airopaidia, 1786, by permission of the British Library, BL
1137.0.17. Figs. II, 12, 13, 14, 15. 16, and 17: Cirrus, cumulus, and stratus; Cirro-cumulus, cirro-stratus, and cumulo-stratus;
Nimbus, from Luke Howard, On the Modifications of Clouds, 1804, by permission of the British Library, BL I393-k-l6.(l.). Fig. 20:
Watercolor of clouds by Luke Howard, c. 1807, by permission of the Science and Society Picture Library, U.K. Fig. 21: Portrait of
Luke Howard by John Opie, c. 1807, by permission of the Royal Meteorological Society, U.K. Fig. 22: The original Beaufort scale
of 1806, Crown Copyright. Fig. 27: Photograph of cumulus cloud by Ralph Abercromby, from The International Cloud Atlas, 1896, by
permission of the British Library, BL 8753- dd-1*7 ■
For Jo Lynch