By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition.
Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind--combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason--that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.
By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition.
Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind--combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason--that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.
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Overview
By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition.
Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind--combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason--that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374536206 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 06/21/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 416 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 7.60(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Peter Moore was born in Staffordshire in 1983. He is the author of Damn His Blood: A True and Detailed History of the Most Barbarous and Inhumane Murder at Oddingley and the Quick and Awful Retribution. He is a visiting lecturer at City University, where he teaches nonfiction writing, and was recently the writer in residence at Gladstone's Library in Hawarden, Wales.
Read an Excerpt
The Weather Experiment
The Pioneers Who Sought To See The Future
By Peter Moore
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Peter MooreAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86547-809-1
CHAPTER 1
Writing in the Air
At a quarter to eight on a breezy spring morning in 1804, Francis Beaufort of the Irish Telegraph Corps came racing up the broad upper slopes of Croghan Hill, his militiamen close on his tail. He was instantly at work. He jammed 'at least nine ounces' of tobacco leaves into a lead pipe, pulled out a match, held it close and let it catch. The flare ignited, smoke coiled into the morning air. In seconds Beaufort and his men were engulfed by the thick, earthy aroma of tobacco. In a letter to his sister Fanny written two days later Beaufort declared proudly that his flare 'made the hollow between the little moat and the summit of the hill look like the crater of Mount Vesuvius in an eruption'.
Beaufort was a short man, not much over five feet. On mornings like this his men might catch sight of the sabre scars on his arms, reminders of his days at sea. Now they had a moment to rest at the top of Croghan Hill, a whale-backed elevation that sloped out of the Bog of Allen in the Irish Midlands, and watch the smoke rise. This was part of a predetermined plan, Beaufort's way of signalling their location to Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the Chief Telegrapher, who was lodged nine miles away in the hamlet of Kilrainey.
Beaufort had woken late that morning. Anxious that he was going to miss Edgeworth, he had set off on a fifteen-minute scramble up the hill. In his letter to Fanny he noted that he had almost broken his neck on the way. His sister would have recognised the description. This childlike, superabundance of energy characterised all he did. Even his letters home rang with exclamation marks, or skipped from one sentence to the next in a chain of breathless dashes.
But this was just one side of Beaufort, a passionate edge reserved for an intimate few. Outwardly he was a practical man. He had a tidy, scrupulous mind that had served him well during his ten years of service in the Royal Navy. Now he was bringing this experience to bear overseeing the construction of Ireland's first ever optical telegraph line. This was the brainchild of Beaufort's brother-in-law Richard Lovell Edgeworth. It consisted of a chain of hilltop stations out of which a tall pole rose fifteen feet into the air. To the top of this pole was fastened a large isosceles triangle that could be turned around like the hands of a clock to any one of eight distinct positions. The whirling of the triangle corresponded with a vocabulary that Edgeworth had invented so that words or phrases could be transmitted along the line, with one station mimicking the movements of another.
It was an exciting project with stations planned to link Dublin on the east coast with Galway on the west. If the machines worked, and Edgeworth was certain that they would, it should be possible to transmit messages between the two places in minutes – a dazzling thought. For the past six months, Beaufort's job had been to lead his militia from one location to another: sourcing the raw materials, building guardhouses and stations and training men to understand the telegraph code. Little by little they had progressed, and throughout the winter and spring months of 1804 telegraph stations had been appearing on the landscape, looking to the untrained eye like diminutive windmills.
It was difficult work but Beaufort loved being out in the open air. That morning on Croghan Hill, with his flare burned out and his militiamen 'cold and tired', he decided to enjoy the view. He discharged his men and remained on the top alone. Beaufort was used to analysing the atmosphere and watching its subtle shifts. Now in his solitude he gazed out across one of the most exhilarating views in Ireland. Many were drawn to the top of Croghan Hill to enjoy the panoramic vista and on that spring morning the terrain of his homeland stretched out in miniature beneath him. Far to his east were the Wicklow Mountains, rising and falling, on the horizon. Closer were the deep brown hues of the bogs, a treeless barren country, notoriously perilous for those on foot, but cast in glossy morning light even they glowed with lustre. To the north the shifting patterns of the sky were reflected in the shallow water of Lough Ennell, a locale that, tradition held, had inspired Jonathan Swift's miniature kingdom Lilliput a century before.
In his letter to his sister Fanny, Beaufort wrote:
It was a most great and sublime scene ... the honesty of my situation – the anxiety about the heights – and the awful magnificence of the still, silent and half visible world, far above which I seemed to be elevated – the brilliancy of the moon and the rapidity with which the clouds flew overhead (from my nearly being in them) – kept my thoughts sufficiently and delightfully employed.
Beaufort's letter is steeped in the language and passions of his age. He responds to the view more like a Romantic poet than a military man. His eyes are attuned to the 'brilliancy' and, paradoxically, 'awful magnificence' of the world around him. The racing, pulsing atmosphere has brought on a giddiness, a tightening of fibres, a sensation that he is eager to convey to his sister. This was a typical response. Beaufort basks on the hill, overawed by an atmosphere that seems beyond comprehension. Like others of his time – he was born within four years of Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth – he remained in thrall to the philosophy set down by Edmund Burke half a century before: the Sublime, that exquisite combination of terror and bliss, and its effect on the soul.
* * *
Edgeworth's optical telegraph had been commissioned as a part of the Irish response to Napoleon Bonaparte's gathering armies on the French coast. A prototype had been displayed and tested before Lord Hardwicke, the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin, and was now the source of considerable excitement. Should the French attack, as seemed likely at the start of 1804, it would give the government a way of communicating the news across the country and perhaps even the chance to raise the militia in response.
For years before, governments had been forced to rely on hilltop beacons or flares – like that burned by Beaufort on Croghan Hill – to spread news of invasions. Other methods had been tried too: church bells, trumpets, cannon fire, carrier pigeons, drums and torchlight had all been used with varying degrees of success to send simple dispatches of life or death, peace or war. But each method had been hampered by its own specific difficulty. Well into the eighteenth century written letters remained the most reliable way of transmitting complex messages across distance. But even in urgent cases these could only travel as fast as the gallop of a horse. More often they crawled between the cities and towns, towns and villages, bearing tidings of events that had long since happened.
So slow was the trickle of information that people remained almost completely ignorant of anything that happened beyond their own personal sphere. Reports, for example, of Captain Cook's murder in Hawaii in 1779 took eleven months to reach England. A decade later, in July 1789, ten days passed before Parson Woodforde heard the news in Norfolk of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris. Matters had improved gradually throughout the eighteenth century with the expansion of the turnpike network in England. This offered a steady and straight surface for the red, maroon and black mail coaches that rolled sluggishly along them (at 7 mph on a good day). But in Ireland with its dangerously rutted roads, overgrown bridleways and meandering country lanes, a letter written in Dublin would commonly take a week to arrive at its destination in Galway.
The emergence of the optical télégraph in France promised to revolutionise this. News of its invention had spread through British society, in August 1794, when a design for the device was discovered in the pocket of a prisoner in Germany. Newspapers seized on the story, equally exciting and terrifying, that their revolutionary enemy had invented a machine that allowed them to communicate across hundreds of miles in a flash. The télégraph was the invention of Claude Chappe, a bright and determined engineer, displaced clergyman and member of the Société Philomatique in Paris. Forced from his clerical living at the start of the Revolution, Chappe had turned his mind to invention and, with the help of his brothers, conceived the idea of a machine capable of sending messages with clarity, speed and confidentiality. After several prototypes he settled on a design that, the Annual Register observed, imitated the form of the human body. The télégraph was fifteen feet tall and had two adjustable arms that were fixed to an upright pole. 'Were two men to make signs to each other at a distance,' the Register had explained, 'too great for seeing the ordinary motions as made by dumb people, they would move their arms as Monsieur Chappe moves his telegraph.'
Mounted at stations twenty miles apart so that messages could be relayed with great speed, Chappe's telegraph was truly ground-breaking. Eager to show its potential, enterprising businessmen held telegraphic demonstrations in London's theatres. The British actor and writer Charles Dibdin seized the moment to produce a ballad, which thundered:
If you'll only just promise you'll none of you laugh
I'll be after explaining the French Telegraph!
A machine that's endow'd with such wonderful pow'r
It writes, reads, and sends news fifty miles in an hour
The abrupt appearance of this device had shattered existing notions of velocity. The very word télégraph – a fusion of the Greek tele and graph that literally meant 'farwriter' – became a fashionable euphemism for speed, efficiency and confidentiality. That a gentleman might divulge intimate conversation to another in a distant place without being exposed was a tantalising prospect. That William Pitt the Younger in Downing Street might be able to converse, harry, jostle or intrigue with the Lord Lieutenant in Ireland over his nightly bottles of wine or direct faraway battles from the solitude of his study was an idea that had set imaginations ablaze.
A decade had passed since Chappe's first télégraph line had been completed in northern France and since then a rich variety of designs had been created and tested across Europe. There were shutter telegraphs that winked and blinked, others that waved and whirled. If Edgeworth's device was to work then, like the French, the Irish would theoretically be able to send encoded messages at the speed of light. It would be a visual nerve that stretched the breadth of the country.
To oversee his plans Edgeworth had turned to a talented acquaintance Francis Beaufort. Now aged thirty, Beaufort's life had already followed a colourful course. He had travelled to the far corners of the world, survived a shipwreck, served King George a dozen times in battle and discovered the allure of exploration, a thrill that would come to dominate his life. For Beaufort, at a loose end back in Ireland, the country of his birth, Edgeworth's telegraph project was a chance to plough his talents into a scientific, patriotic pursuit. They both believed that their Irish telegraph was going to change everything. It was a perfect match.
* * *
From boyhood Francis Beaufort had been marked for his talent. Quick-witted and naturally curious, in the 1780s he had filled notebooks with formulas and theorems in an immaculate copperplate hand. An entry from one book kept by his father gives a revealing snapshot of Francis at the age of fourteen. It was penned on a winter's night in Dublin. Long after dark he had lain awake at the family home in Mecklenburg Street, staring into the sky. His attention had been caught by an intriguing circle that ringed the moon. It shone with subtle brilliance. On a scrap of parchment entitled an 'Observation of Francis Beaufort' he recorded what he saw.
On the 12th Dec. 1788 at a little after 11 o'clock I saw a circle around the moon at a distance of about 8' or 9' the breadth of it was a semi [diameter] of the moon it consisted of three shades, the internal one that next the [??] was a lightish purple next that a light red, and next a greenish yellow.
Beaufort is awed by the lunar halo, a sight that he had most likely never experienced before. Rather than letting the moment escape he bottles it for future reference like a botanist with an unidentified specimen. He jots down the time of his observation, and adds quantitative detail to his description, preserving a picture of the scene. This was characteristic of Beaufort. It shows his natural desire to capture and record. It reflects his flair for empirical study: to watch, analyse and distil subjects into a legible form.
It was an early sign of Beaufort's organising mind. Another was a cryptic code invented for himself and his elder brother William – a combination of Greek letters, astronomical symbols and twirling lines – to enable the two to communicate in secret about risqué or forbidden topics like sex and religion. Knowing their father would notice the code, Francis once appealed to him, 'never take ill of my writing things [to] William in a concealed hand or manner, for let me assure you 'tis only little jokes or trifles between us.'
Francis' father could hardly be annoyed, as it was just the kind of behaviour he would have indulged in himself. Reverend Daniel Augustus Beaufort was the guiding force in Francis' young life. Daniel – known affectionately as 'DAB' to his friends – was no ordinary man. Among his many and varied accomplishments was a beautifully accurate map of Ireland. This was his crowning achievement but he was also a classicist, gentleman farmer, architect, hobbyist philosopher and all-round society man who played a role in establishing the Royal Irish Academy. Talented though he was, Daniel Beaufort was constantly hindered by his Micawberish propensity for debt. The state of the family finances meant the Beauforts could never live the cosy life enjoyed by many clergy families. Always in the shadow of the bailiff, they lived a cat-and-mouse existence, fleeing from one place to another. During the first sixteen years of Francis' life they uprooted on six occasions: from Navan in County Meath – Francis' birthplace – to Chepstow in England, then Cheltenham, Dublin, London and, finally, Collon in County Louth in 1789.
Francis' education suffered as a result. He managed just a short spell at a marine academy in the 1780s in Dublin but for much of his boyhood he was schooled at home. His father's contacts did, however, bear fruit in 1788 when he was entered for a spell of private tuition with Dr Henry Usher, Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin. The classes came at a perfect moment in Francis' intellectual development. At dusk he would set out from his home in Mecklenburg Street, down past the legal chambers on Marlborough Street to the noise and bustle of Bachelors Walk and Ormond Quay on the north bank of the Liffey. He would pass the hospital, Royal Square and cut through the market gardens and open countryside of Phoenix Park and the winding road up to Castleknock, away from the dirt, damp and lamps of the city to the clear air and open skies above the newly founded Dunsink Observatory.
Dunsink, four miles outside the city's bounds and 275 feet above sea level, was the finest setting for celestial observation in Ireland. The splendour of the observation house with its lofty dome reflected the importance of astronomy at a time when the limits of the universe were being redrawn by astronomers like William Herschel whose recent discovery of Uranus had delighted the scientific world. At Dunsink Francis received tuition and was given the use of powerful telescopes, charts of the sky and sextants. He learnt to sweep the heavens for stars like Sirius or Polaris, for comets, and to calculate longitude and latitude by celestial observation.
Dr Usher's classes caught Francis on the cusp of adulthood and they would prove invaluable to him in his chosen career at sea. Later he said his heart had been set on becoming a sailor from the age of five and, after a decade of waiting, in 1789 he left Dublin with his father for London where he was 'torn from the paternal wing and launched on the boisterous ocean'. Through DAB's connections, Francis had secured a berth on board an East Indiaman. It was the beginning of a seafaring career in the golden age of sail.
Despite being the 'guinea pig' of the crew, within three weeks Francis had assumed responsibility for the midday latitude measurements. And when not on deck he would spend hours in the crow's nest, watching the world revolving about him. It was a world rich with new words – eddies, fathoms, hawseholes, furling, reefing – and ideas. Sailors still lived in fear of Davy Jones, the spirit of the sea. For luck they carried the caul of a baby or the feather of a wren. They told stories of sirens – sea nymphs who charmed with their melodious voices – and Aeolus, who kept the winds locked up in a mountain and 'loosed them at his pleasure; to afford a passage to the mariner, or to ruin him by a storm'.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Weather Experiment by Peter Moore. Copyright © 2015 Peter Moore. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Author's Note xi
List of Illustrations xiii
Acknowledgements xv
The Weather Experiment 1
Dawn 9
Part 1 Seeing
1 Writing in the Air 13
2 Nature Caught in the Very Act 39
3 Rain, Wind and the Wondrous Cold 64
Morning 93
Part 2 Contesting
4 Detectives 97
5 Trembling Air, Whirling Winds 118
6 Liquid Lightning 141
Midday
Part 3 Experimenting
7 Steady Eyes, Delicate Skies 171
8 Beginnings 199
9 Dangerous Paths 228
Afternoon 255
Part 4 Believing
10 Dazzling Bright 259
11 Endings 281
12 Truth Telling 303
Dusk 329
West Winds 331
Stars in FitzRoy's Meteorological Galaxy 343
Abbreviations 348
Notes 349
Select Bibliography 369
Index 381