The Invention of Clouds: How An Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies


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    • Author : Richard Hamblyn
    • Binding : Paperback
    • EAN : 9780330391955
    • Edition : 2nd edition, revised
    • ISBN : 033039195X
    • Label : Picador UK
    • List Price : CDN$ 14.99 (CAD)
    • Manufacturer : Picador UK
    • Number Of Pages : 304
    • Package Dimensions : 0.79 inches (Height) x 7.56 inches (Length) x 0.44 pounds (Weight) x 5.12 inches (Width)
    • Publication Date : 2002-09-24
    • Publisher : Picador UK
    • Studio : Picador UK

    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

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    Customer Reviews:

    Rated 5.0 stars Customers rated The Invention of Clouds: How An Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies 5.0 stars out of 5.0 based on 7 reviews:

    • LA Times Book Prize Winner

      by zoe williams (Los Angeles, Califormia) - 2002-05-15  Rated 5 stars
      I went to to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last month, and among the many great authors I heard speaking, Richard Hamblyn stood out among the best. He spoke about clouds, mathematics, literature, art, religion, balloons.... I was not surprised when The Invention of Clouds won the coveted LA Times Book Prize. It's so full of wonderful things. This is a must read book.

    • What a wonderful book

      by - 2001-12-11  Rated 5 stars
      This is a wonderful book about a wonderful subject. I don't normally read science books, but this one seemed to be about so much more than clouds. It covers art, poetry, travel and religion: there is even a section on the history of ballooning. It's very well written and full of enthusiasm for the subjects covered. I warmly recommend this book.

    • Love those Cloudy Books

      by - 2001-09-20  Rated 4 stars
      A couple of years ago Farrar Strauss and Giroux published another book on clouds called The Service of Clouds. It was fictional account of a photographer who was obsessed by clouds in the Blue Mountains of Australia in the years leading up to WWI. Like Hamblyn's fascinating book The Service of Clouds was also concerned with religion, aesthetics, literature and culture. In short it was a history of the air in novel form. So if you like The Invention of Clouds I definitely recommend The Service of Clouds.

    • Bringing the Clouds Down To Earth

      by R. Hardy (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - 2001-09-20  Rated 5 stars
      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.

    • Invention of Clouds

      by M. Peleski (Newark, DE USA) - 2001-09-08  Rated 5 stars
      This book is a fascinating look at the origin of the most basic element in meteorology, the names of clouds. A fascinating insight into Science and the role of the Amateur in the early 19th century.

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