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1666 and chief assistant to Christopher Wren
helping design and build the Royal Observatory at
Greenwich, St. Paul’s and The Monument. It was
Robert Hooke who added to the barometer a wheel
with a pointer on a dial writing that it could be used
to predict
‘dry and clear weather when it riseth very
high’
. The barometer was to become quite a status
symbol in the homes of wealthy Georgians and in
the coming century, as the price of the instruments
dropped, barometers found their way into the
drawing rooms of the middle classes too. Perhaps
this is an important factor in explaining how the
British came to be so interested in the weather?
Hooke also improved on the instrument called an
hygrometer, which is used to measure atmospheric
humidity and when the German physicist Daniel
Fahrenheit came up with the mercury thermometer
in 1714 it became possible to accurately measure the
weather and to some extent to predict what weather
was to come. By 1765 the French scientist Laurent
Lavoisier was making daily records of air pressure,
humidity, wind speed and direction and using this
information to make reasonably accurate predictions
for the weather a day or two ahead. But with no
reliable or quick way of disseminating this data
these were strictly local and very short range
forecasts. The predicted weather would have been
and gone by the time anyone got to hear that it was
on its way!
When Records Began
The golden era for the British amateur meteorologist
fell in the hundred years from the 1780s and one of
the earliest British weather pioneers was John
Dalton. Dalton is best remembered today for his
work on atomic theory, (he was one of the first to
state that matter is made up of small particles) and
Turner detail Tate Britain
colour blindness, of which he had personal experience,
and which today is still sometimes called Daltonism.
But Dalton came to his atomic theories almost
accidentally when he puzzled over the properties of
the atmosphere via his enthusiasm for meteorology.
Dalton began recording the weather as a young man of
21 and continued for the remaining 57 years of his life.
When you hear that holy litany of the weather man
(and we do seem to hear it more and more often)
since
records began
, it’s Dalton’s records they are referring
to. The homemade instruments he invented were
primitive but the huge amount of data that he collected
helped to turn forecasting into a science. The Quaker
Dalton led a modest life but when he died 40,000
people walked behind his coffin
.
The Cloud Man
It was, at times, and quite literally, a laugh a minute at
the largely Quaker Askesian Society (from the Greek
word for application or training) founded in London in
1796 for the members, who either read a paper or paid
a fine, regularly held laughing gas evenings. Luke
Howard earned his living as a pharmacist on Fleet
Street and later a manufacturer of aspirin and quinine
but in 1802 to avoid his fine, the naturalist and amateur
meteorologist read to the Askesians his paper
On The
Modification of Clouds.
Folk had always given names
to clouds and to varying degrees understood that they
were associated with particular types of weather but
the names varied greatly. Mackerel skies, for example,
were recognised by English farmers -
Mackerel Sky
never long wet, never long dry.
Sailors watched out
for them as the forerunner of storms –
Mares tails and
mackerel scales make lofty ships take in their sails.
But in Germany and France mackerel skies were called
sheep clouds or buttermilk sky. Howard, inspired by
his studies in botany that used Linnaean classification,