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

~ (Author) "It might seem difficult to imagine now, in this era of cool detachment, but in the opening years of the nineteenth century people cheered loudly..." (more)
Key Phrases: meteorological register, cloud atlas, cloud poems, Luke Howard, Plough Court, William Allen (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

British science writer Richard Hamblyn skillfully blends biography with scientific and cultural history to capture for modern readers the remarkable achievement of Luke Howard (1772-1864), the quiet Quaker whose classification of cloud types we still employ today. "Cirrus," "cumulus," and "stratus" now seem almost self-evident descriptions, but when Howard gave his epochal lecture at London's Askesian Society in 1802, the bewildering variety of clouds was more obvious than anything else. Howard's great achievement, writes Hamblyn with characteristic elegance, was "the penetrating insight that clouds have many individual shapes but few basic forms." His graceful résumé of meteorology from the time of the ancient Chinese shows just how difficult generations of scientists found it to make sense of clouds, which frequently served as a metaphor for the awesome complexity of the natural world. Hamblyn's marvelous portrait of English cultural life at the turn of the 19th century reminds us how enthralled the general public was by scientific lectures and demonstrations, which served as a form of popular entertainment as well as a valuable tool in the dissemination of knowledge. "People cheered at lectures," he notes, and young men like Howard, a pharmacist by trade, "refused to allow the circumstances in which they found themselves to deflect them from [a] heroic sense of destiny." This was the great age of amateur scientists, many of them Dissenters like Howard whose religious unorthodoxy barred them from government service and aristocratic clubs. They forged their own place in England's burgeoning industries and in the scientific revolution unleashed by Isaac Newton. Howard, a devoted husband and father active in educational work and the antislavery movement, was representative of the remarkable autodidacts who reshaped European culture. Their work "served the equal demands of pleasure, instruction, and imagination," states Hamblyn, whose delightful book fulfills the same admirable purpose. --Wendy Smith

From Scientific American

The amateur meteorologist was Luke Howard, a London chemist who gave the three basic cloud families names that survive today: cirrus, cumulus and stratus. Howard had, Hamblyn writes, "the penetrating... insight that clouds have many individual shapes but few basic forms." The author, who supervises undergraduates in English and the history of science at the University of Cambridge, weaves several strands-Howard's work, the lively London science scene 200 years ago and the development of meteorology-into a grand story.

Editors of Scientific American

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1st edition (July 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374177155
• ISBN-13: 978-0374177157
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,104,524 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wondrous story about weather and much more, August 23, 2001

By	Eileen Galen (USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Until the early nineteenth century, there was no unified system within any scientific or meteorological community for either naming or classifying clouds. The texts produced by nearly all ancient civilizations, the Chinese Shang Dynasty, and in addition Aristotle, Plato, and much later, Descartes, Linnaeus (much too rigidly) and many others had sought to analyze and describe clouds. Hamblyn notes that clouds' observed properties had been variously cited over time in order to reinforce the status quo in politics, philosophy, and religion - or to promote ideas (offensive to Napoleon among many others) about the zodiac, divination, and prophecy. Lamarck had attempted classification of clouds. He published vivid descriptions that were, as it turned out, of no real scientific use.

English amateur meteorologist Luke Howard had thought about this problem for quite some time. In 1802 he delivered his address, "On the Modification of Clouds," to a teeming lecture hall in London. His seven "modifications" of clouds were cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, cumulus, cumulostratus, nimbus, and stratus. (If you never have been able to memorize the list, you're in good company: contemporary complaints included the gripe that, innovative or not, "the seven 'easy ' names [were] doggedly difficult to remember.") Despite the Latin, his news was received with great enthusiasm - although there would eventually be controversy regarding nomenclature, with British colleagues urging the use of the mother tongue.

Howard described not only the look of clouds, but the specifics of their formation, structure and behavior. His lively audience was captivated by his simple, elegant, and wholly original view, and "by the end of the lecture Luke Howard, by giving language to nature's most ineffable and prodigal forms, had squared an ancient and anxiogenic circle." Howard had "named the clouds," and he was the first to have done so.

His system was useful to scientists, sailors, poets and philosophers - and just about everyone in between. Coleridge and Wordsworth were enthusiastic. Goethe wrote to Howard. (Howard thought the letter was a hoax, and dispatched a close friend to get to the bottom of it.) Later, Goethe would write poetry on clouds, and Constable would paint them

This is an unusual and beautiful book. Hamblyn is a humanitarian and a sensitive and skillful writer. He provides a deeply intimate and sympathetic biography of Howard, a good man for whom fame and celebrity was never the point of his life's work. (He was happy to take time off from science, for example, to tend to his wife and new baby in 1803.). Correspondence and contemporary accounts have been consulted. What could have been a rather dry, even plodding story becomes completely engrossing and full.

In addition, there is a thrilling and detailed portayal of the many towns and cities of nineteenth-century Britain (particularly London) that teemed with scientific lectures, "philosophical shows and diversions," cheering audiences eager to learn more, always more about "every animal, vegetable, mineral known to man, samples of 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 an insatiable and astonished public."

The English scientific community's relationship to the French is explored. One of the many good things about this book is the way that it conveys the immense popular contemporary enthusiasm for science, technology, and innovation in nineteenth- century Britain. Hot-air ballooning, advances in the understanding of the properties of wind, fog, rain, and microclimate, Arctic exploration, and dozens of major and minor figures in the history of science are compellingly described and discussed. The meteorology is clear and requires little more readerly background than would a good look at the Weather Channel. There are good endnotes and a good index. In every way this book is a wonderful read, utterly accessible, and full of contagious passion for its very interesting subject.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bringing the Clouds Down To Earth, September 19, 2001

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Part of the overarching scientific revolution of the early nineteenth century was that we gained a language to talk about clouds, and surprisingly, this language was the invention of one man, an amateur meteorologist whose work is still the foundation for cloud observation today. The impressive and rather sweet story of how Luke Howard bequeathed clouds to scientific discussion and study is told in _The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies_ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Richard Hamblyn. You may not have heard of Howard, but you have spoken his language.

Howard was born to a Quaker family in 1772 in London. Perhaps the greatest influence in his life was his stern father, who would give advice like "What does idleness produce but mischief of every kind?" This advice he must have thought especially needed by his son, who had a lifelong passion for staring out the window and looking at the sky. Fortunately, Howard found work that allowed him to associate with other young men in a scientific improvement society, and he gradually developed his classification system. From his long hours of loving observation, he defined and illustrated three main cloud forms, now familiar to us: cirrus, cumulus, and stratus. There were intermediate forms, for a total of seven, which he also defined and illustrated. He presented his system in a lecture in 1802, at a time when popular lectures on chemistry and electricity would excite crowds into swooning enthusiasm. The drab, undramatic Howard, attired in his unadorned Quaker garb, modest and full of trepidation, managed to give a presentation of his categories illustrated by his watercolors. It was found thrilling first by the audience in the theater, and thereafter by those who found his essay in print. It is to the credit of the scientific ardor of the times that Howard's simple, effective, comprehension-amplifying definitions and classifications were a sensation. Howard, to his dismay, became "the well-known meteorologist Mr. Howard," a worldliness of fame that was in conflict with his strong Quaker convictions.

Howard's work went on to inspire Francis Beaufort to classify wind speed in a comparable objective fashion, and we still use a version of Beaufort's scale today. It seems that the landscape painter Constable studied Howard's system and used it in his depictions of sky. It inspired Europe's greatest intellectual icon, Goethe, aging but rejuvenated just at the contemplation of Howard's system. In fact, we know little of Howard's life, most of his personal details coming from a biographical letter the admiring Goethe asked of him. In _The Invention of Clouds_, Hamblyn has taken the facts of Howard's life, made some justifiable and tantalizing speculations, and produced a fine history of the scientific tenor of Howard's time. But it is above all the inspiring story, brightly and clearly told, of a dreamer who could not keep from staring out the window at the skies.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Charming Book about a Man Everyone Should Know, September 5, 2001

By	D. Muchow (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Richard Hamblyn does an immaculate job of painting the picture of the world of almost two hundred years ago, opening with the presentation room as it must have appeared to Luke Howard, the inventor of our current system of naming clouds. He takes what has since come to be a dull and pedantic topic and re-invigorates it with the Victorian Zeitgeist, including quotes from Goethe, passages from Howard's diary, and the unfortunate results of political infighting among society-academics unrivalled since the age of Newton and Voltaire. The book is also beautifully presented in a half-height format suitable for either the coffee table or the reference shelf. Bravo!