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Predicting the Weather Victorians and the Science of Meteorology
By KATHARINE ANDERSON The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2005 The University of Chicago
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-01968-0
Chapter One Prediction, Prophecy, and Scientific Culture
POISED between divination, opinion, and calculation, weather prediction was a controversial enterprise. When he began to send statements about the coming weather to the newspapers in August 1861, the first director of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade adopted, as a new term, the word "forecast." "Prophecies or predictions they are not," Robert Fitzroy wrote. "The term forecast is strictly applicable to such an opinion as is the result of a scientific combination and calculation." Eighteen years later, Robert Scott, Fitzroy's successor, turned to a metaphor of contagion made newly potent by Louis Pasteur's researches, when he warned that "the smallest lurking germ" of prophecy endangered meteorology. The anxiety was deserved: Fitzroy and his successors quickly became known as the "government Zadkiel," a reference to Victorian Britain's most notorious astrologer. As a Punch satire pointed out, Zadkiel made the same kind of prophecies as "them voorcasts, what a' calls 'Weather Predictions'"-but he supplied them for a whole year in advance and for all England at once. "Meteorology? Yaa! What's that to the Voices o' the Stars?"
The complex identity of prediction and prophecy in Victorian culture shaped these different responses to the project of forecasting the weather. Weather prediction may be the single most important feature of the history of meteorology, because it was a signpost for the development of the discipline and showed how it was embedded in a wider culture. Claims about prediction engaged a set of scientific, historical, and religious ideas about the future, the past, and the human ability to discover both. What was the relationship of the calculations of an eclipse, to a prediction about geological strata, to an astrological prophecy of the illness or death of a sovereign, or to the interpretation of contemporary politics as fulfillments of Biblical prophecy? This range of ideas was particularly significant in a period when scientific men sought to extend their authority, proposing scientific method as the foundation of all reliable knowledge. Prediction was a demonstration of the powers of science. "There is no more convincing proof of the soundness of knowledge than that it confers the gift of foresight," William Stanley Jevons summarized in his Principles of Science (1874). Because prediction underpinned the extension of scientific reasoning to all studies and all questions, clarifying the nature of proper forms of prediction was critical. In the words of John Stuart Mill, "A complete logic of the sciences would be also a complete logic of practical business and common life." Scientific predictions that failed were challenges to the eminence of scientific thought, and to the social order that sound knowledge upheld.
The standards of science, then, supported much more than inquiry into the natural world; they were the scaffolding for rational human relations. Prediction, moreover, seemed to make that framework visible; that is, it involved a social form of demonstration as well as a logical one. Prediction took scientific reasoning into the public world. It allowed, or required, men of science to display their wares and impress their audience, and it linked science to a public presentation of its value. As a critical element in debates about scientific reasoning, prediction seemed especially important in investigations of phenomena that were beyond direct experience. Such investigations proliferated in the scientific world of the nineteenth century, in historical sciences like geology or paleontology, in studies of psychology and perception, and in a science of social behavior. Subjects as diverse as gold prospecting, mesmeric clairvoyance, the history of Roman Britain, legal treatments of circumstantial evidence, and theological discussions of prophecy shared a common thread. They all sought to assess the status of knowledge of matters beyond direct experience. Like these, weather prediction raised broad questions about styles of knowledge and the justifications of scientific method.
The scope of this analysis can be traced in an anonymous work first published in 1865. Modern Prophecies paid extended tribute to "the development of a science of prophesying" and reflected the significance that ideas about prediction had assumed in the mid-nineteenth century. "We are compelled by an absolute necessity to forecast the future, since all the activities of man are a preparation for it," the author wrote, "and in this consists our life." The book outlined a series of forecasts divided into three categories of religion, politics, and free trade. The Bible would cease to become the standard of authority, and Catholicism would grow while the Church of England declined. The British Empire would increase mightily, Europe would form itself into a confederation of Europe, and the United States would acquire a new role, in which it "will reject the policy of non-interference, and join in the intrigues, policy and wars of Europe." The factory system would transform "the conditions of labour in all parts of the world" while the newspapers, "a sort of whispering gallery which echoes every prediction," would progress from their informal "parliamentary" role into a formal wing of government. All professions would be opened, even to women, the Church of England would be separated from the State, and the government would lose its postal monopoly. None of these predictions were particularly shocking. As their author pointed out, they were the accumulated stock of conversations over his lifetime. The interest of this account lies not with the predictions themselves but with the framework within which they were set.
For the author, the list was an opportunity to define the importance of prediction. Just as chemists can "foretell accurately the results of certain experiments," just as "the gathering of storms is known before they exist" and "the astronomer predicts eclipses," human affairs may develop into a science of the future tense. Precision of this sort is a distant goal, the writer acknowledged. But even in the present state of knowledge, he argued, prophecy was an immensely powerful force. Although prophecy was increasingly repudiated in religious doctrine, it still summarized the imagine did entity of every nation, including that of Britain. "A thousand years of honour lie before the people ... She shall be greater than Rome, as Cromwell said; and the instructress of nations, as Milton prophesied." Such visions of times to come, noted the author, now governed commerce as well. "The prophecies of the future are eagerly discounted upon mercantile exchanges, and the prices of securities form new and most sensitive barometers of the state of nations." This prophetic picture was built on a natural account of constant change. Referring to geology and to Darwin's theory of natural selection, the author suggested that "a sublime and harmonious principle of growth pervades the universe." This principle extends to "all the institutions of man." The most important feature of the age was the gradual extension of our knowledge of the past and the future through an understanding of sciences as varied as astronomy, geology, meteorology, and mental physiology. Our lives are lived either in the past or future.
The author's identity was revealed when the work was republished in 1887 by his son, Harry Lupton, a resident of Chesterfield, in northeast England. Arthur Lupton, who had died in 1867, was a graduate of the University of London. He had been, according to his son, "devoted to intellectual pursuits," especially "the study of history, theology and metaphysics, and the more popular branches of science." As was obvious from his book, Lupton was a Liberal committed to free trade. Writing a generation later, the son endorsed the father's characterization of prediction as the spirit of the age. Extending his father's remarks on commerce, Harry wrote an account of stock trading in Liverpool. In this city, trading on what would now be called futures had emerged in the 1840s and 1850s in cotton, a direct consequence of steam navigation and the establishment of Samuel Cunard's mail lines across the Atlantic. Cunard could bring news of crops and even transport samples more than six weeks faster than the sailing ships crossing the same distance, so that merchants could sell cargoes "to arrive" in advance of the actual supply. This type of market expanded in the years of the cotton famine of the 1860s, when the American Civil War interfered with supply of cotton. The pattern of such speculation was well in place by the time of a further revolution in communication that took place just about the time of Arthur Lupton's death-the completion of the Atlantic cable in 1866. Men like the Luptons, then, familiar with mid-century Liverpool, had a ringside seat for the emergence of these forms of trading; by 1887, Lupton could present this activity as an ordinary matter of fact. "By far the greater part of transactions [in the stock market] are purely speculative, and every post carries thousands of predictions all over the country as to the rise or fall of stocks." If we consider this transformation of commerce, Harry Lupton insisted, his father's idea of a science of prophesying, in which we could weigh and calculate even the most difficult matters, was not then so visionary. To him, the parallels with another telegraphic novelty were obvious. "The daily forecast of the weather now published in the papers" was simply "a remarkable instance" of the prophetic spirit of his times. Under these conditions, he concluded, it is difficult to say "where 'experimenting' ends and 'prophesying' begins." Science was rewriting old categories of knowledge, and weather forecasts were both experiment and prophecy.
The vision of prediction, ranging from astronomy to stock trading, that emerged in the Luptons' text was not unusual. But their confident account made the contests among these activities invisible, ignoring the controversy that surrounded such a comprehensive extension of scientific authority. This controversy, as later chapters will reveal, found a particular focus in weather forecasting, but it can be seen more generally in the debates about the place of prediction in scientific knowledge. The status of prediction was critical to whole-hearted advocates, like the Luptons, but it was similarly important to the critics of modern scientific culture. Defining prediction was a way to separate scientific naturalism from troublesome forms of supernaturalism, like astrology or religion. How scientific men treated questions of prediction became then a kind of barometer of their claims to intellectual, moral, and cultural leadership.
The Ideal of Prediction
In the course of the nineteenth century, as the Luptons' work made clear, striking new events, disciplines, and practices established contemporaries' expectations of scientific work. In addition to weather forecasting, these included the discovery of new planets, gold in Australia, and statistical regularities in human behavior. But the chief stories of the predictive power of science came from astronomy, precisely founded on the twin pillars of Newton's celestial mechanics and impressive new technologies, from giant telescopes to the photo-registration of observations. "The age of mere wonder" at eclipses, in John Herschel's view, was past; it had been replaced by more enlightened appreciation of the calculations and certainty involved. "A page of 'lunar distances' from the Nautical Almanac," wrote Herschel, "is worth all the eclipses that have ever happened for inspiring this necessary confidence in the conclusions of science." At the center of any discussion of astronomy and prediction lay the discovery of Neptune, the powerful culmination of exact science. In the summer of 1846, at a time when dedicated observers with powerful new telescopes were regularly bringing new planetary bodies to light, the presence of a planet, which became called Neptune, was predicted by the analysis of irregularities in the orbit of Uranus by both John Couch Adams of Cambridge Observatory and Urbain LeVerrier in Paris. It was immediately verified by observations taken at Berlin in September. Priority disputes aside, the incident exemplified scientific reasoning about unseen phenomena. One popular account described LeVerrier "advanc[ing] step by step along the intricate maze of his researches, ... cheerfully executing calculations which diffused are almost appalling to contemplate; until a bright flood of light is finally over all his labours, and the distant member of our system, which human eye has not yet seen, discloses itself to his purely intellectual scrutiny with all the certainty of demonstrative reasoning." Prediction was a demonstration of the power of this pure intellectual scrutiny.
Dramatic, well-publicized international expeditions to view eclipses followed. In 1851, for a July total eclipse of the sun, George Airy, the Astronomer Royal, directed an extended series of observations in Sweden and Norway, and, nine years later, an even more elaborate expedition was mounted in northern Spain. These travels confirmed for the Victorian world the prestige of astronomical science. In parallel, physical astronomy, the study of constituent matter of the stars and planets using the spectroscope, began to venture predictions that went further and further into the future. By the mid 1860s, with the development of theories of entropy, these predictions extended, as John Stuart Mill put it, "even to the dissipation of the sun's heat and the heaping up of the solar system into one dead mass of congelation." Astronomy had reached as far as the end of time.
During the same era, the authority of astronomy also underwrote the most novel, controversial forms of scientific prediction: a statistics of society. Starting in the 1830s and 1840s, social science developed on the strength of its use of a technique for measuring error in astronomical observations. Looking at large numbers, statisticians found startling regularities, even in the most disorderly and arbitrary events, such as crimes or-in one renowned example-the number of badly addressed letters that languished unclaimed in post offices. These regularities allowed for an extraordinary kind of prediction, such as that in the mortality tables described by William Farr, director of the General Register Office, founded to collect population data in 1838. "It would have been considered a rash prediction in a matter so uncertain as human life to pretend to assert that 9000 of the children born in 1841 would be alive in 1921," he explained in his 1843 annual report. "Such announcement would have been received with as much incredulity as Halley's prediction of a return of a comet." But just like Halley, the statistician can rely upon "the constancy of nature; hence [Halley] ventured from an observation of parts of the comet's course to calculate the time in which the whole would be described." Predictions just as remarkable, concluded Farr, are now possible elsewhere. "Although we little know the labours, the privations, the happiness or misery, the calms or tempests, which are prepared for the next generation of Englishmen, we entertain little doubt that about 9000 of 100,000 of them will be found alive at the distant Census in 1921." For Farr and his contemporaries, statistics exemplified the new and striking powers of scientific reasoning.
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Excerpted from Predicting the Weather by KATHARINE ANDERSON Copyright © 2005 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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