The Invention of Clouds – How an amateur meteorologist forged the language of the skies.(book review)

Title :- The Invention of Clouds – How an amateur meteorologist forged the language of the skies.

By :- Richard Hamblyn

Published :-Picadore, Great Britton (2001), Paperback (260 pages)

Outline :- This is one of the most wonderful and complete books I have enjoyed reading.

It starts out with a young man wondering about the bad weather. Apparently volcanoes in Greenland and Japan had put immense dust into the atmosphere causing three successive failed summers. This meant that crops did not ripen, and the seed preserved for next years crops failed to produce enough food or seed for the following years plantings. Massive potato blight caused the Irish to migrate to USA. The importance of weather is profound. We then come to the age of the first hot air balloons when men can actually go up into the air, and see a second sunset on the same day. This is also the time of scientific clubs where educated and armatures mix and learn about the new science. Luke Howard (1803) proposed a simple Latin based nomenclature for naming clouds (Cirrus, Cumulus, Nimbus and Stratus), and the completion was on from all countries and scientist to provide counter classifications and different forms of naming. Luke’s simple classification won the day.