The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future by Peter Moore

Author:Peter Moore [Moore, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
ISBN: 9780374711276
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Daily News intended these reports to reassure farmers throughout the harvest. By autumn they had seemingly run their course and were dropped. Unwittingly, though, the newspaper had hit on something – weather reporting. This new idea appealed for both its practicality and its novelty. It turned out that readers in London had enjoyed studying tables of weather as they ate their morning toast. It had allowed them to discover whether a friend or family member had been caught in the rain at Brighton or basked in the sunshine at Deal. For weeks following the end of Glaisher’s reports the newspaper received letters asking if the bulletins would return. One enquiring note arrived from none other than Airy himself. Whether Airy wrote on Glaisher’s behalf is uncertain, but he told the editor that he had found the information useful. He had started to plot it on a map and had been on the point of writing to praise an idea that was ‘likely to lead to results of great scientific value’ when the scheme had abruptly ended.

Airy’s intervention was significant. A keystone in British scientific life, his opinions carried weight and the Daily News could hardly brush him aside. Instead they wrote back with a resolve to start the project afresh. This time, though, the scheme was modified to work over a longer period of time. They decided to replace the telegraph with the railways. Wondrous as it was, the telegraph was too expensive for daily use and the network was still limited. Railways by comparison were a better alternative. By 1848 about 5,000 miles of track had been laid across Britain, far more than the amount of telegraphic wire, and the Daily News managed to elicit the support of the Great Northern, Great Western, South Western, South Coast, Lancaster & Carlisle and York, Newcastle & Berwick railways, who agreed to carry reports to London for free.

It was an exciting development. Airy and Glaisher drew up a list of fifty railway stations spread across Britain, and from there Glaisher took on the task of communicating with the stationmasters. Within a few weeks Glaisher was once again on his travels, this time carrying a simple skeleton form, including the place, date, wind direction, strength (calm, gentle breeze, strong breeze, hard wind, storm or heavy gale) and type of weather: cloudless, partially cloudy, overcast, foggy, scud, rain, heavy rain, snow, hail or thunderstorm. Communication between the governmental departments seems to have been poor; had Airy talked to his friend Beaufort in Whitehall he would have learnt about his more advanced wind scale and weather code. But the departments remained fractured, ploughing their own distinct furrows. Still, at least it was a start.

By the next summer the operation was under way. The first bulletins were published in the Daily News on 14 June 1849 under a heading ‘Meteorological Table – Showing the State of the Weather at each of the following places at Nine o’clock yesterday morning’. Meanwhile back in Greenwich Glaisher was doing more than just archiving the old data.

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