Weather Observation and Climatology Prior to 1770

From the invention of meteorological instruments in the middle of the 17th century, natural philosophers recognized that little could be won from individual weather diaries or registers; instead, organized groups of observers were needed. As G.A. Hamberger, Christian Wolff's mentor at the University of Jena, put it:^[8]

It is not enough to examine the state of the air in our own location, but we must direct our attention to the surrounding regions. This may best be done if well-informed persons throughout several provinces and neighboring kingdoms record [weather observations] simultaneously. . . . If many ephemerides of this type, from various locations, are published and compared, they will throw great light on [weather] phenomena.

Short-lived organizations or networks of weather observers had been set up around the middle of the 17th century by Périer, Pascal's brother-in-law; by Robert Hooke at the Royal Society of London; and by Ferdinand II of Tuscany, patron of the Accademia del Cimento in Florence.^[9] Little came of their efforts and interest in

[8] G.A. Hamberger, De barometris (1701), quoted in Gustav Hellman, Repertorium der deutschen Meteorologie (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1883), 884. As the title of the work suggests, Hamberger was discussing barometric observations in particular.

[9] Hellman, "Die Entwicklung der meteorologischen Beobachtungen bis zum Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts," Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Physischmathematische Klasse, Abhandlungen , 1927, 9; W. Knowles Middleton, A history of the thermometer and its use in meteorology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), 30–2; H. Howard Frisinger, The history of meteorology: To 1800 (New York: Science History Publications, 1977), 101–2.

coordinated weather observation declined from about 1660 to the end of the century.

In the early years of the 18th century as few as three or four natural philosophers in all of Europe culled weather observations from newspapers and magazines and from reports of correspondents. After 1715 more energy is evident: at Breslau the physician Johann Kanold published in his quarterly Breslauer Sammlung observations he compiled from a dozen locations across Europe.^[10] In 1723 the Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London carried James Jurin's "Invitatio ad observationes meteorologicas."^[11] In it Jurin, the Society's secretary, laid out a plan for daily readings of barometer, thermometer, wind strength and direction, precipitation, and the state of the sky. Some fifteen observers, from Bengal and St. Petersburg to Cambridge, Massachusetts, responded with weather diaries, which William Derham, a Fellow of the Society and author of works on physicotheology, edited for the Philosophical transactions. This labor made Derham the most prolific meteorologist of the first third of the century.

Although Kanold and Jurin had ambitious hopes for their networks, the results fell short of expectations. Observers had difficulties in obtaining instruments. For example, Derham located few observations of the hard winter of 1709–10 made with instruments.^[12] There seem to have been no instruments in the American colonies prior to 1716, when the physician Cadwallader Colden began observing in New York; as late as 1727 neither barometer nor thermometer was to be found in the Boston area, where Isaac Greenwood, first Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard, served as Jurin's delegate on the weather watch.^[13] A number of Jurin's

[10] Sammlung von Nature- und Medicin- wie auch hierzu gehörigen Kunst- wie Literatur-Geschichten , Breslau, 1717–30.

[11] James Jurin, "Invitatio ad observationes meteorologicas communi consilio instituendas," PT, 32:2 (1722–3), 422–7.

[12] William Derham, "History of the great frost in the last winter 1708 and 1708–9," PT, 26 (1708–9), 454–78.

[13] Derham, "An abstract of the meteorological diaries communicated to the Royal Society," PT, 37 (1731–2), 261–79, on 267; J.H. Cassedy, "Meteorology and medicine in colonial America: Beginnings of an experimental approach," Journal of the history of medicine, 24 (1969), 193–204, on 197–9; Brooke Hindle, The pursuit of science in revolutionary America, 1735–1789 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956), 88.

volunteers observed without instruments, as did most of Kanold's—instruments seem to have come late and few to central and eastern Europe, where about half of Kanold's observers were stationed.^[14] A late 18th-century meteorologist at Prague reported that meteorological instruments first appeared in Bohemia in 1750 and were still rare two decades later.^[15]

Even when instruments were available, their measurements were nearly useless unless the instruments were comparable—that is, unless instrument scales were interconvertible. Comparability of barometric observations posed no difficulty in principle, since the length of a mercury column serves as a natural scale for atmospheric pressure—though the variety of national and even regional units of length confused matters considerably. But the variety of scales for the thermometer greatly diminished the usefulness of temperature readings. Although Jurin attempted to secure comparable observations by asking his volunteers to specify the scale and make of their thermometers, many failed to do so. Derham found reducing their data "a matter so perplexed and difficult, as not to answer the great trouble of it."^[16]

Lack of precision and reliability posed further problems. Instruments neither rendered accurate readings, nor could they be depended upon to render the same reading twice in identical situations. Precision and reliability, in fact, did not trouble early 18th-century natural philosophers.^[17] Imperfect instruments generated much confusion and waste—as late as 1750 measurements made with

[14] Jurin distributed thermometers to his observers (as had Hooke and Ferdinand II), but they were frequently lost or broken during transit. Cf. Louise Diehl Patterson, "Thermometers of the Royal Society, 1663–1768," American journal of physics, 19 (1951), 523–35; "The Royal Society's standard thermometer, 1663–1709," Isis, 44 (1953), 51–63; also J.L. Heilbron, Physics at the Royal Society during Newton's presidency (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1983), 105–6.

[15] Anton Strnad, "Meteorologische Beobachtungen auf das jahr 1775," Privatgesellschaft zur Aufnahme der Mathematik, der vaterlandischen Geschichte, und der Naturgeschichte, Prague, Abhandlungen, 2 (1775), 392–9.

[16] Derham, "An abstract of the meteorological diaries communicated to the Royal Society," PT, 38 (1733–4), 101–9, 334–44, and 458–70, on 464.

[17] However, see Heilbron, Electricity, 81.

inaccurate barometers led eminent natural philosophers to question Boyle's law.^[18] As for weather observation, "how many observations have we lost," lamented one late 18th-century meteorologist, "through the imperfection and uncertainty of Mr. Hauksbee's thermometer!"^[19] This was just the thermometer Jurin used and supplied to his network.

Observers were scarcely more reliable than their instruments. The discipline of recording daily temperature, pressure, humidity, winds, and cloud cover over a period of years did not come easily. As Derham put it, "these investigations require not only industry and inclination, but also leisure and means and opportunity, which you seldom find together."^[20] Rather than follow Jurin's instructions, several of his informants simply submitted registers they had completed in earlier years. Under these circumstances, a consistent collection of observations was unlikely. The labor of reducing the registers delayed publication, making matters worse. In 1732 and 1733, when the project had almost ended, Derham published comparisons of the weather of 1707 at Upminster and Coventry, the weather of 1715–22 at Upminster and Cambridge, New England, and the weather of 1724 in Lund and St. Petersburg.^[21] Analyses of the project's last registers, which had been submitted in 1734, did not appear until 1742.

Imprecision and unreliability of instruments, lack of agreement among scales, indiscipline in observation and inconsistency of published collections—all these factors limited the achievements of early 18th-century climatology. A thoroughgoing quantitative treatment was not possible. Instead, meteorologists described the weather and summarized observations by calculating monthly and annual means of temperature and pressure and amounts of rainfall. They aimed, as

[18] Feldman, "Applied mathematics," 137–8.

[19] Jan van Swinden, Dissertation sur la comparaison des thermomètres (Amsterdam, 1778), ix. Van Swinden was one of the chief meteorologists of the latter part of the century.

[20] Quoted in Heilbron, Physics at the Royal Society , 108.

[21] Derham, "An abstract of the meteorological diaries," PT (1731–2) and (1733–4).

Derham put it, to give "a just notion of the state of every month . . . and that which was most observable in it."^[22] Even when good quantitative data were available, they did not exploit it. From Jurin's observer at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg Derham received records of the temperature, pressure, winds, and general state of the weather taken three times daily during 1724 and 1725. He felt, however, that the "observations (although very curious and useful), yet being too long, would be tedious to read at the Society's meetings."^[23] What sort of quantitative treatment could there be when, as was the practice at scientific academies, Derham read his reports at the Society's weekly meetings?

Besides describing the weather, meteorologists also drew comparisons among the locations reporting to them. Derham, for example, compared the mean annual rainfall of half a dozen European towns.^[24] Comparisons aimed particularly at coincidences in weather patterns at different locations, that is, at Meteorologica parallela .^[25] Derham repeatedly pointed out agreements among prevailing winds and storms at the towns he was comparing, as well as parallel barometric motions, which were striking. When temperature observations were not comparable, as between Zurich and Upminster, he could still see that the maxima and minima of the two series—that is, warm and cold spells—coincided. "Yea, oftentimes any remarkable weather (especially if of somewhat long continuance) affecteth one as well as the other place."^[26] During one month the weather at Zurich "constantly preceded ours here [at Upminster] by about five or more days." Pieter van Musschenbroek, who among his other services to natural philosophy sponsored a network of half a dozen Dutch observers, observed a similar parallelism: "when the south-east wind blows, it arises half a day sooner at Middelbourg than at Utrecht."^[27]

[22] Derham, "An abstract of the meteorological diaries" (1733–4), 105.

[23] Derham, ibid., 101–2.

[24] Derham, "A prospect of the weather," PT, 24 (1704–5), 1877–81.

[25] David Algöwer, Meteorologica parallela (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1714), cited in Hellman, Repertorium , 880–1.

[26] Derham, "Tables of the barometrical altitudes at Zurich in Switzerland in the year 1708," PT, 26 (1708–9), 332–66, on 333.

[27] Musschenbroek, Essai de physique , 2 vols. (Leyden: Chez S. Luchtmans, 1739), 895ff.; Derham, "An abstract of the meteorological diaries," PT (1731–2).

These coincidences resulted, of course, from the fact that single weather systems cover large parts of Europe. But only one or two meteorologists understood this before the 19th century. Derham saw this much: that "the weather in both places was influenced by the same causes, whether the Alpine hills and the cold, or the influx of the moon and other heavenly bodies, or any other cause."^[28]

Meteorologica parallela were one type of correlation sought by early 18th-century meteorologists. The "weather rule" was another. Meteorologists hoped to discern patterns in their data that would allow them to predict the weather. Thus Kanold expected his collection to provide a "historical-theoretical attempt to predict one storm from another." Derham derived a number of rules from the observations of Jurin's network: "a cold summer is commonly a wet one"; "western clouds bring much wind"; "the falling of the quicksilver in dark and cloudy weather betokeneth rain; but the rain is always preceded by fair weather."^[29] These and other "superstitious calendar-prognostications"^[30] had long been common in almanacs and popular tradition. Meteorologists hoped to place them on a scientific footing.

These weather rules, meteorological parallela, and general descriptions and comparisons of the weather reflect an approach to the natural world that has been well characterized by Michel Foucault. In his study of 18th-century medical practice he wrote, "Disease is perceived fundamentally in a space of projection without depth, of coincidence without development." Disease appears in the "space" of the human body as in a space without character, flat; the different locations in this space do not affect the disease, so that for example dyspepsia in the lower abdomen, breathlessness in the chest, and epilepsy in the head represent the same disease.^[31] Just so, meteorologists perceived the space of the earth's surface as characterless. We

[28] Derham, ibid., PT (1733–4), 342.

[29] Derham, ibid., PT (1731–2), 265, 267, and (1733–4), 101–2, 105. John Locke also hoped to extract weather rules from collections of observations. See Locke, "A register of the weather for the year 1692," PT, 24 (1704–5), 1917–37; Kanold, Sammlung von Natur- und Medicin- wie auch hierzu gehörigen Kunst- wie Literatur-Geschichten .

[30] Algöwer, Meteorological parallela , "so abergläubischen Calender-Prognosticis."

[31] Michel Foucault, Birth of the clinic (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 6, 10.

would see the space between Lund and St. Petersburg as a land (and water) mass of great extent, with a richly varied topography (and depth, embracing currents, varying temperatures, varying proximity to land masses, etc.), affecting the weather across its entire compass. For Derham and his colleagues this space might as well not exist. The weather is either the same or different at Lund and St. Petersburg; Derham could compare the weather at Upminster and Coventry, or at Upminster and Cambridge, New England, as easily. So characterless, or "flat," was his perception of space that Derham could call the Alps "hills" and say that the same causes influenced the weather at Zurich, in their midst, and at Upminster, hundreds of miles away in the plains of his island nation.

Just as space, of itself, did not affect the weather, so "there is no process of evolution in which duration [i.e., time] introduces new events of itself."^[32] The weather rule, which correlates weather events at succeeding times with no sense of the creative role played by those times, exemplifies this approach. "Western clouds bring much wind," but we have no sense of the connecting skein of time, of the intervening process.

All this represents a lack of synthetic vision, which appears also in meteorologists' failure to describe the climates of places. They calculated mean temperatures and pressures, found days of monthly and annual extremes, and counted the number of days of rainfall. They did not, however, synthesize this information into a characterization of climate. To borrow once more from Foucault, their calculations named the "visible" aspects of the weather, but they did not penetrate to the hidden coherence among these aspects, that constitutes climate.^[33]

Nor did they integrate the collection of places they studied into a the notion of a region—so that, a fortiori, they did not discuss regional climates.^[34] (Two groups did discuss regions and their

[32] Foucault, Birth of the clinic , 12.

[33] Foucault, The order of things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 132.

[34] Malcolm Nicholson has pointed out that 18th-century botany and plant geography similarly lacked the concept of regionality. See Malcolm Nicholson, "Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldtian science and the origins of the study of vegetation," History of science, 25 (1987), 167–94.

climates: plant and human geographers, mentioned above, and mathematicians who calculated the effects of the sun's heat on different parts of the earth. They belonged to traditions distinct from meteorology; neither group drew on the weather observations considered here.) Climatology, then, existed in neither deed nor word in the early 18th century; what meteorologists gathered was a natural history–a collection of descriptions of the weather here and there, at this time and another. Given the piecemeal character of their data, it would have been difficult for them to proceed otherwise.