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The Upper Thames can still freeze as it did in that
dread winter of 1962 into 1963, when the Thames
froze at Windsor. But none of this can come close to
the experience of daily life in Yakutsk in Siberia,
officially the coldest place in the world. As I write the
local temperature is –minus 24 C and it’s snowing
slightly but the mercury has been known to fall to
minus 64 C – and yet they still have outdoor lavs!
In Yakutsk the fur coat is not a fashion statement.
I once knew of a girl who, before the prohibitions of
more recent sensibilities, bought an old astrakhan coat
at a jumble sale. Astrakhan is the tightly coiled fleece
of the foetal or newborn Karakul lamb. This girl
worked for a big company with out-of-town offices
surrounded by acres of staff car parking and being of
quite junior rank her car parking space was quite a
schlep from the office door. One day she decided to
wear the astrakhan coat to work. Having parked her
car she had just begun the trek across the great asphalt
desert when the heavens opened and it rained to
monsoon proportions. It turns out that astrakhan coats
can absorb incredible amounts of water and as the
coat grew unbearably heavy so she gradually sank to
her knees. Unable to go any further thus burdened
she didn’t so much as take the coat off as roll out
from beneath it. Security had to come out and rescue
the big old thing. With a trolley.
Back to the Science of Weather
From the 1500s the science behind the weather grew
as instruments were invented to measure atmospheric
properties – temperature, moisture and air pressure.
Gradually natural phenomena once ascribed to acts of
god or witchcraft such as rainbows and storms were
described in geometric and mathematical terms. In the
book of Matthew, Jesus had said “You are able to
interpret the appearance of the sky but the sign of
the times you cannot interpret.” Now the days of
forecasting the weather by simply looking at the sky
were numbered, (it’s slower progress on interpreting
the signs of the times but many are giving it a go).
In 1643, in the Papal States, a young man called
Evangelista Torricelli, built on the early work of his
friend, the Renaissance hero Galileo Galilei and
invented the barometer, a simple device to measure
air pressure. Experiments with vacuums were very
brave at a time when the church considered any talk
of God allowing an absolute nothingness to be heresy.
But by studying the fall and rise of water in the
vacuum inside a glass tube Torricelli deduced that
‘we are living submerged at the bottom of an ocean
of air’
. The weight of this air on the water in the bowl
outside his glass tube was causing it to rise and fall.
The water rose to a maximum height of 33 feet which
was rather unwieldy so he replaced the water with
mercury and he was able to see that the height of the
mercury column changed with air temperature.
From this work he worked out that:
‘winds are produced by differences in air
temperature, and hence density, between two
regions of the earth’.
Robert Boyle, chemist, physicist, philosopher and
fourteenth child of the 1st Earl of Cork spent three
years at Eton before setting off with on a Grand Tour
of Europe. In Florence he studied the work of the still
living Galileo Galilei and he brought home to London
in the 1660s Torricelli’s barometer. Boyle’s big
interest was vacuums which he used in his gas law
experiments. His assistant was Robert Hooke, a
native of the Isle of Wight, who would later become
Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of