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

Hamblyn, Richard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312420013 ISBN 13: 9780312420017

Publisher: Picador, 2002

Synopsis

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

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 meteorologist, Luke Howard, and his groundbreaking work to define what had hitherto been random and unknowable structures―clouds.

In December 1802, Luke Howard delivered a lecture 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.

Although his work is still the basis of modern meteorology, Luke Howard himself has long been overlooked. Part history of science, part cultural excavation, The Invention of Clouds is a detailed and informative examination of Howard's life and achievements and introduces a new audience to the language of the skies.

About this title

About the Author

Richard Hamblyn was born in 1965 and is a graduate of the universities of Essex and Cambridge, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on the early history of geology in Britain. He lives and works in London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Invention of Clouds

How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the SkiesBy Richard Hamblyn

Picador USA

Copyright © 2002 Richard Hamblyn
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780312420017

Chapter One

The Theater of Science

Science, illuminating ray!
Fair mental beam, extend thy sway,
       And shine from pole to pole!
From thy accumulated store,
O'er every mind thy riches pour,
Excite from low desires to soar,
       And dignify the soul.

Sarah Hoare, 1831

It might seem difficult to imagine now, in this era of cool detachment, but in theopening years of the nineteenth century people cheered loudly at lectures. Whilefiling through the doors into a lamplit hall, upon the arrival of the speaker and hismercurial props, or at signal moments of disclosure and display, audiences foundopportunities to make themselves heard. It mattered little whether the speaker was amechanic, a meteor zealot, or simply an amateur showman on a mission to explain.Anyone with confidence and good vocal projection could arrange to appear at oneof the endless assemblies of paying spectators that were springing up fast throughoutthe expanding cities of Europe and North America.

    The full range of the philosophical shows and diversions available to audiencesat the turn of the nineteenth century was various and impressive, particularlyin the towns and cities of Britain, and especially in London, where there was nothingisolated or unusual about a lecture such as Howard's on the clouds. As eveningfell, the crowds assembled and the revelations began to unfold. And what a cast ofrevelations they were: every animal, vegetable, and mineral known to man, samplesof all four elements, and challenges to all six senses, not to mention machines, inventions,and novelties of every kind, were regularly paraded before the eyes of anastonished and insatiable public. There were demonstrations of fireworks, hydraulics,magnetics, and mathematics. There were machines to show the revolutionsof the planets, the eruptions of volcanoes, or the hidden operations of thehuman heart. There was even a machine?dubbed the Eureka by its maker?for theproduction of Latin hexameters. Even a dead language could be brought to life bythe magnificent actions of a machine.

    By the end of the eighteenth century the grip of rational entertainment hadfirmly secured itself on the public mind, and had done so because it served theequal, if novel, demands of pleasure, instruction, and imagination. Science hadbeen on the rise for a century or more, and had now ascended to its height, whereit drifted through the cultural atmosphere of the age. London, already blessed withthe finest scientific and medical instrument makers in the world, was now the centernot only for empirical measurement but also for conjectural pleasure.

    Such pleasure was relentlessly pursued. According to an article in the Observeron July 27, 1806, for example, the exceptional thunderstorm that had occurred theThursday before "afforded ample opportunity at the Theatre of Science, 97 PallMall, to Mr Hardie's talents in defence of his new Theory of Lightning." It certainlydid. The evening's entertainment had begun with what were by then familiargalvanic experiments ("among them the generation of various solid bodies from amixture of different transparent gases") but had gone on to culminate in a spectaculardisplay of "meteors, aurora borealis, real lightning and other phenomena," alldemonstrated as alleged supports for Mr. Hardie's curious theory?stubbornlymaintained against the growing evidence to the contrary?that meteorological activityhad nothing to do with electrical force.

    More noteworthy than the hypothesis itself, perhaps, was the fact that wellover a hundred people had paid to hear it; they were crammed into every inchof available space, with latecomers standing at the back. This was profitable entertainmentat its best, delivering what the metropolitan audiences of late GeorgianEngland wanted most of all to see and to hear: the revelations of a profligatenature.

    Yet Hardie's "Theatre of Science" was only one of dozens of such popularand paying concerns. West End theaters like the Haymarket, the Lyceum, and theDuke of York's, as well as coffeehouses, taverns, and riverside pleasure gardens,were toured continually by philosophical showmen with their arrays of scientificand pseudoscientific displays. The efforts of itinerant lectures such as James Fergusonof Banffshire (1710-1776) or the great Adam Walker of Westmoreland(1731-1821) served to define the mainstream of public scientific understanding:uncritical, nonspecialist, and wide-ranging in its enthusiasm for the spiraling diversityof knowledge. Long queues formed outside Walker's astronomy lectures atthe Haymarket Theatre, where he showcased his illuminated twenty-foot model ofthe giddily revolving planets. His lectures, every bit as vivid as his props, were enormouslysuccessful, and he was soon able to buy himself a house in Hanover Squarefrom the proceeds. Walker was foremost in the train of self-made scientists whoearned their living by subordinating new findings in chemistry, physics, and astronomyto the glorious reign of Spectacle, ushering onto the stage in rapid successiontheir hydraulic and hydrostatic machines, their Copernican models of therevolving solar system, their automatic chess players and other mechanical marvels,and their baroque optical chimeras, such as the cloud of eerie smoke that slowlycleared to reveal the ghastly guillotined head of Antoine Lavoisier, the celebratedbut doomed eighteenth-century chemist and tax collector.

    Lavoisier had been executed in 1794 by a Revolutionary Tribunal that was allegedto have declared, through the summing-up of the judge at his trial, that "theRepublic has no need of scientists." Although it has taken the French two centuriesto come to terms with this act of uncompromising barbarism ("It took them onlyan instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century,"as Joseph Louis Lagrange was to comment in tears), in England the episodewas quickly recruited as a cautionary tale to be told against the excesses of Frenchrevolutionary fervor. The gorily modeled head of the decapitated chemist, part ofthe "Phantasmagoria" show held at the Lyceum Theatre during the summer monthsof 1802, was flourished both as a piece of entertainment and as a tribute to thefreedoms of British research. Luke Howard and his circle of philosophical friends,drawn from the young men and women of Dissenting London, were not alone inrevering Lavoisier as a tragic intellectual hero, cut down in the prime of a brilliantcareer.

    This theater of knowledge was an important part of the climate of the Enlightenmentera, an age often characterized as the Age of Reason, and it furnishedthe background to Luke Howard's lecture. The leading players, among whose numberhe was soon to take his place, were always the scientific performers, and, as inany other branch of dramatic performance, the reputations of the major stars commandedlarge audiences and commensurately generous rewards. The greatest ofthese performers, celebrated by lecturer and pretender alike, was the young CornishmanHumphry Davy (1778-1829), who became a wealthy London celebrityduring the opening years of the nineteenth century. He was renowned for his extravagantand explosive demonstrations, for his speaking energy, and for the mesmerizingeye contact with which he held his audiences spellbound during the entirechemical proceedings on stage. Davy was the dark-haired, romantic son of a Penzancecarpenter, and his looks and language were those of a poet, albeit a poet ofenormous worldly ambition. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey maintainedthat Davy would have been a great poet had he not become a great chemist,while admiring women were heard to whisper that his eyes were made for somethingbesides poring over crucibles.

    Here, then, was a man of great charisma, of star quality, as we might say today,although had his own scientific research not been serious enough to overtakehis growing reputation as a speaker, he would now be one of the many mostly forgottenperformers of the learned London stage. But at the outset of his London career(which was to culminate in the presidency of the Royal Society), his fame was asa showman rather than an innovator. His work at the Pneumatic Institute in Bristolduring the 1790s had already won him a reputation as the world's most incandescentpublic speaker; so it was inevitable that his career would take him toLondon, and when he gave his inaugural public lecture at the newly opened RoyalInstitution of Great Britain on January 21, 1802, porters were needed to keep theimpatient crowds in check. Albermarle Street, it was reported in the press, wasblocked with carriages for an hour. The new lecture hall itself, with its gallery, pit,and slanting stage, was designed to give the elegant building as theatrical a feel aspossible. Separate entrances had been designed to prevent the social classes frommingling, for as in other recent attractions, such as balloon and parachute ascents,where "Sweeps, Gemmen, and Ladies all scamper'd together," the Royal Institutionwas a popular (and populist) attraction. From there, Humphry Davy, black-eyed,magnificent, and unstoppable, rose to become the presiding spirit of public sciencein Britain.

    The handbills for his lectures promised electrical demonstrations, galvanicexperiments, and semicontrolled explosions of gases, all of which attracted large,excited, and extremely vocal crowds who willingly paid their money to (in the languageof the fairground) enter and be amazed. And it was with genuine amazementthat Coleridge, after attending one of Davy's demonstrations, recorded how a sampleof ether "burns bright indeed in the atmosphere, but o! how brightly whitelyvividly beautiful in Oxygen gas," while the lecturer himself was just as dazzling:"every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of vitality. Living thoughts springup like turf beneath his feet."

    Soon entire audiences were to find themselves as captivated as Coleridge.According to one of Davy's earliest biographers, "the sensation created by his firstcourse of Lectures at the Institution, and the enthusiastic admiration which theyobtained, is at this period scarcely to be imagined. Men of the first rank and talent?theliterary and the scientific, the practical and the theoretical, bluestockings,and women of fashion, the old and the young, all crowded?eagerly crowded thelecture room. His youth, his simplicity, his natural eloquence, his chemical knowledge,his happy illustrations and well-conducted experiments, excited universal attentionand unbounded applause. Compliments, invitations, and presents, wereshowered upon him in abundance from all quarters; his society was courted by all,and all appeared proud of his acquaintance." Humphry Davy was the man of themoment, the Horatio Nelson of dry land, and Luke Howard was in the audiencefor a number of his demonstrations. Like others, he was moved to wonder at theunbounded energy of the man. It was as if the spirit of scientific inquiry itself hadfound expression in the person of the genius from Penzance.

    Davy remained the most celebrated scientist in Britain for another twodecades, until his death in Geneva at the age of 50 deprived the world of his talents.His end, much mourned among the learned circles of Europe, was almost certainlyhastened by carbon monoxide poisoning, the result of a lifetime of hazardous experimentsdevised to determine the properties of gases. He would breathe them inuntil, as often as not, unconsciousness intervened. Waking, he would find himselfslumped at his worktable, with burning lungs and an aching head. Humphry Davy'slife of scientific self-sacrifice was rounded by a sadly fitting death.

But why should the theater of natural knowledge have gained such a hold on thepopular imagination at the turn of the nineteenth century? Why should its audienceshave lined up for so long and clamored so loudly for more, as they did at theRoyal Institution? The answer lay both in the novelty of the subject and in the stateof general science education at the time. The vast majority of the population,whether educated or not, had simply never witnessed such processes as these: magnesium,flaring intensely, burning with a kind of stellar light that few could have imaginedexisted on earth, or sodium, first isolated by Davy himself, fizzing profanely ina container of water with a diabolic mineral energy. Metals that burned upon contactwith air, or drab-looking powders, harmless on their own, that when mingled in ajar combusted suddenly and violently to produce billows of noxious gas. Phosphorus,with its white flame and searing heat, "the devil's element" (and not just becauseit was the thirteenth to be isolated), was offered up not only as a spectacle but also,alarmingly, as a medical marvel for the treatment of tuberculosis and gout.

    The discovery and application of such substances served the growing needsof industry and technology, and their public display was increasingly becoming anintegral part of the process. New kinds of natural and material knowledge were takingtheir place within the wider cultural definition of the age. The secrecy of the alchemistswas giving way to the high-profile publicity of the chemists and thephysicists?the natural philosophers, as they termed themselves?who promised touncover the secret properties of the natural world. And they, unlike the earlier alchemists,were delivering on their promises with aplomb.

    Their confidence was bolstered by newly emerging frameworks for scientificthought that emphasized nature's long-term capacity for slow and steady change.Alchemists had sought the secrets of sudden transformations that lay at the heart ofthe material world, but research in the growth areas of scientific inquiry, such asgeology, with its various associated branches of volcanology, seismology, stratigraphy,and mineralogy, was beginning to make it clear that the gradual, unseenprocesses that had shaped the world and its objects remained ongoing into thepresent. Distant catastrophe was not the only model of geophysical formation.The earth was still changing as it always had, in only just perceptible increments.The terrifying new idea arose that entire stretches of landscape were continuing torise and fall under the unseen pressures of the earth, while water, the most powerfulof the elements because the most patient, was continuing to shape and reshapeitself across the yielding portions of the earth. All that stands now, here in the present,will at some unknown point in the future be violently borne away. The universewill never cease its dance of change and mutability, and the processes by whichit moves and convulses, whether gradual or sudden in their overall impact, werenow to be considered as the true subjects of natural scientific inquiry.

It is not hard to see how the idea of natural changeability provided much of theconceptual background for the development of scientific meteorology. Clouds andweather, perhaps more than any other world phenomena, show clearly that there isno moment in nature when nothing can be said to be happening. As clouds racetoward their own release from form, they are replenished by the mutable processesthat created them. They drift, not into continuity, but into other, temporary statesof being, all of which eventually decompose, to melt into the surrounding air. Theyrise and fall like vaporous civilizations, and the challenge to early meteorology wasto reveal their hidden dynamics to our sight.

    Yet meteorology is not an exact science. It is, rather, a search for narrativeorder among events governed not by laws alone but by the shapeless caprices of theatmosphere. Weather writes, erases, and rewrites itself upon the sky with the endlessfluidity of language; and it is with language that we have sought throughout historyto apprehend it. Since the sky has always been more read than measured, it has alwaysbeen the province of words. Nothing has changed since Samuel Johnson complainedin the middle of the eighteenth century that "when two Englishmen meet,their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what they mustalready know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm." The weather,as Johnson so pertinently suggested, generates language more efficiently than itgenerates knowledge, for while it is always available and always with us, it is equallyalways unclear. That is why we need to talk it through. And in lectures such asthose given by the unparalleled Davy on his platform in the hall on AlbermarleStreet, or by the young Luke Howard, facing his audience in the chemical basementoff Lombard Street, that was exactly what was happening. The world was beingtalked, and being shaped by that talk, into a new kind of natural order.

    The age was one of the great ages of talk, an age that raised the art of conversationto the status of a public act. Language coursed through the events that werehosted at the London lecture halls, and at the dozens of similar venues across therest of the country, impressing them with a lasting cultural and scientific imprint.The river of words was in flood with the chemical poetry of minerals and machines:galvanism, latent heat, elective affinities, the steady state. New words and new ideas circulatedrapidly like a spoken currency among new and ready audiences.

    Images from scientific discourse began to permeate the wider language in anunprecedented way. Who could resist peppering their talk with mesmerism, magnetism,lodestones, and longitude? Who, like the Bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, couldresist writing to a friend in 1761 to ask that she "make the same distinction between myheart, & those that are hard by nature, as our virtuosi do between petrified shells, &those which are lapides sui generis"? Or Jane Austen's too-rational Sir Edward Denham,of the unfinished Sanditon of 1817, who, in a characteristic tirade against novels("those puerile Emanations"), complained that "in vain may we put them into a literaryAlembic;?we distil nothing which can add to Science," although Austen and herreaders would have shunned the implication. Novels, after all, offer the finest calibrationswith which to measure the fluctuations of socioeconomic pressure.

    In a more sympathetic tone, meanwhile, Sarah Hoare's hymn to a sea conchwas awash with harmoniously specialist terms:

Gracefully striate is thy shell,
Transverse and longitudinal,
          And delicately fair

while Goethe based the structure of an entire novel on the metaphor of chemical attraction.His Eduard and Charlotte, the romantic catalysts of Elective Affinities (1809),bond helplessly to one another like a pair of affiliated molecules. They are not themselvesso much as the agents of an irresistible natural force. Austen's Sir Edward Denham,no doubt, would have considered their escapades unutterably foolish.

    This world of the natural sciences was an open mine of similes, quarried tosupply the increasingly expressive requirements of the age. Elizabeth Montagu'sheart, like Alexander Pope's grotto at Twickenham, was encrusted with a geology ofsentiment. Little wonder that Coleridge attended Royal Institution lectures in order,as he put it, "to renew my stock of metaphors." He himself was to offer newwords to the language, coining the term psychosomatic after watching his hero,Humphry Davy, cure a case of suspected paralysis by administering a course ofplacebos.

    This was what the future must have looked like for the many who crowdedthe auditoriums of the burgeoning theater of science: not just a parade of man'sever increasing familiarity with the mutable territories of nature, but the unalloyedjoy of their discovery and naming. Here was a cultural scene that delighted in boththe unraveling of the processes of nature and the languages forged in the attempt.As new forms of understanding emerged, new forms of expression, both literal andmetaphorical, appeared alongside them to support them in their work. The newways of seeing became increasingly bound up with the new formulations of words.

    This was the climate, with its as yet unchanged belief in the positive virtuesof science and scientific thought, into which Luke Howard was due to release hisclassified names for the clouds. And his language, too, the language of the skies,would rise to enrich the wider cultural climate of the age. It would give weight tothe weightless forms of the air, institute a transformation of outlook and expression,and alter forever the relationship between the world and the restless, overarchingsky.

Continues...

Excerpted from The Invention of Cloudsby Richard Hamblyn Copyright © 2002 by Richard Hamblyn. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Picador
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312420013
• ISBN 13: 9780312420017
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256