Origins of meteorology

March 23, 2005 9:44 PM

Weathering the Weather: The Origins of Atmospheric ScienceA "glorious selection" of strikingly beautiful pages from classic publications about meteorology. [via plep].
posted by mediareport (8 comments total)

The first serious attempt to measure rainfall
The first treatise on oceanography
From 1661, one of the earliest classics of ecology
AN ESSAY ON DEW, AND SEVERAL APPEARANCES CONNECTED WITH IT
Early hurricane charts
posted by mediareport at 9:52 PM on March 23, 2005

This is great!
The " INTERNATIONAL CLOUD-ATLAS PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE" you linked is gorgeous.
Also amazing to see so many names known from other branches of science got involved - John Dalton, one of the founders of chemistry, James Hutton the founder of geology .
Shows how specialised the sciences have had to become I suppose.

I'll throw in my favorite image of "how many great waters fell from heaven" by Albrecht Dürer. Not scientific at all though.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:11 PM on March 23, 2005

whoops:
INTERNATIONAL CLOUD-ATLAS PUBLISHED BY ORDER OF THE COMMITTEE.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 10:21 PM on March 23, 2005

Nice! An explanation of how Luke Howard derived the names for clouds can be found here. For example, Cirrus is latin for curl of hair (according to this site).

Howard was the subject of a book (link to amazon) a few years back. I've heard good things about it, but have not had the chance to read it.
posted by halcyon_daze at 8:42 AM on March 24, 2005

Awesome, thank you.
posted by jokeefe at 11:30 AM on March 24, 2005

You're very welcome. :)

And, halcyon_daze, I was delighted to learn from your first link that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck actually beat Luke Howard to the punch and was the first to publish a cloud classification scheme, which lost out because 1) it used French instead of Latin and 2) it appeared "in the same publication (Annuaire Méteorologique) as forecasts based on astrological data." The more I learn about Lamarck, the more I like him.
posted by mediareport at 9:51 PM on March 24, 2005

I am thereby forced to concede, then, that whenever one is considering the invention of a new form of scientific nomenclature, one must keep in mind that locution is everything.

*running*

*ducking*
posted by halcyon_daze at 11:08 AM on March 25, 2005

*throws shoe, misses*

You should have worked "locution, locution, locution" in there somewhere. :)
posted by mediareport at 5:59 PM on March 25, 2005