Weather Observation and Climatology, 1770–1790
Between the time of Jurin's and Kanold's networks in the 1720s and 1730s and the last third of the century, interest in meteorology fell off.[35] The wars of the mid-18th century disrupted cooperative efforts and undoubtedly discouraged individual observations as well.
Around 1770 the situation changed abruptly. No meteorological treatise of Europe-wide reputation had appeared for more than a century.[36] Between 1770 and 1790, however, half a dozen authors in as many countries published treatises of international renown and substantial papers populated the journals;[37] meteorology was
[35] Hellmann, Repertorium , 978, 986. Hellmann provided data on numbers of individual observers only for the Germans.
[36] See Hellmann, "Entwicklungsgeschichte des meteorologischen Lehrbuches," in Hellmann, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Meteorologie, 6 , Veröffentlichungen des Königlichen Preussischen Meteorologischen Instituts, 296 (Berlin, 1917), 1–133, on 52.
[37] Important treatises of the period include Jean André Deluc, Recherches sur les modifications de l'atmosphère, 2 vols. (Geneva: J.A. De Luc, 1772) and Idées sur la météorologie, 2 vols. (London: T. Spilsbury, 1786); Louis Cotte, Traité de météorologie (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1774) and Mémoires sur la météorologie, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1788); Horace Bénédict de Saussure, Essais sur l'hygrométrie (Neuchâtel: Chez S. Fauche père et fils, 1783); van Swinden, Dissertation sur la comparaison des thermomètres ; Giuseppe Toaldo, La meteorologica applicata all'agricultura (Venice: G. Storti, 1775). Hellmann documented a sharp rise around 1770 in numbers of meteorological publications and of observing stations in Germany. The number of publications more than doubled from the 1760s to the 1770s and increased by a further 25 percent in the 1780s. The number of "station-years" of observations doubled twice in the two decades. Hellmann, Repertorium , 978, 986.
"zealously pursued throughout almost the whole of Europe."[38] Organized meteorology prospered. Throughout France, Great Britain, and the United States, economic, agricultural, and patriotic societies sponsored programs of meteorological observation and research. In France a national network of observers was established in 1778 under the auspices of the Société royale de médicine, while the Societas meteorologica palatina at Mannheim constructed an international network whose work was not surpassed for three-quarters of a century. Contemporaries spoke of meteorology as "a new science."[39] Ludwig Kämtz, the chief authority on meteorology during the first half of the 19th century, agreed. It was in the last half of the 18th century, he wrote, that "this part of physics first began to be treated scientifically."[40]
Interest in meteorology derived from a number of sources, of which two particularly affected weather observation and climatology. One was the application of meteorology to agriculture and public health. Prior to the advent of bacteriological theories of disease in the late 19th century, physicians followed the ancient Hippocratic doctrine that climate, topography, and living conditions—in short, the environment—are among the chief causes of disease. The particular content of the doctrine varied. In the original Hippocratic treatise "On airs, waters, and places" the seasons influence the balance of humors in the body by virtue of what was called the "constitution" of the air: the constitution of summer being hot and dry; of autumn, cold and dry; of winter, cold and wet; and of spring, a balanced mixture of all four qualities. These constitutions favor certain groups of diseases; an abnormal season or sudden changes in the weather also cause outbreaks of disease. Winds (airs) blowing from different directions, the orientation of towns (places) facing the winds, and the towns' water supplies (waters) similarly affect disease patterns. These
[38] Jean Sénébier, "Sur les moyens qu'on pourrait employer pour perfectionner la météorologie," Journal de physique, 27 (1785), 300–15, on 301.
[39] "Sur le froid de 1776," Académie royale des sciences, Paris, Histoire , 1776, 1–14, on 9; quoted by David Cassidy, "Meteorology in Mannheim: The Mannheim Meteorological Society, 1780–1795," Sudhoffs Archiv, 69 (1985), 8–25, on 8.
[40] Ludwig Kämtz, Lehrbuch der Meteorologie , 3 vols. (Halle: Gebauer, 1831–6), 1 , viii.
groups or patterns of disease attacking a population were termed the epidemic constitution.[41]
While abandoning the theory of humors, the 17th and 18th centuries retained the notion that airs, waters, and places influence the epidemic constitution. The same four qualities—hot, cold, wet, and dry—were now held to act mechanically on the body; the air might also contain disease-causing effluvial exhalations from the interior or surface of the earth. Such theories led numerous physicians to keep weather observations in the expectation of correlating weather patterns with diseases. A typical mid18th-century product was Paul Malouin's annual "Histoire des maladies épidémiques, observées à Paris, en même temps que les différentes températures de l'air," which offered qualitative descriptions of each month's weather and epidemic diseases.[42] Agriculture enjoyed nothing like the corpus of theory relating the weather to disease, but agriculturalists hoped that regular observations would succeed in correlating the weather with the success of crops. The most prominent midcentury effort of this type was Duhamel du Monceau's "Observations botanico-météorologiques," which for forty years presented annual tables of weather observations and general remarks on crops and public health.[43] Duhamel's and Malouin's series became important models for later efforts.
This genre of medical and agricultural climatology became institutionalized in the last third of the century as European states increasingly intervened in matters of public welfare. Contemporaries referred to interventionist measures as "police"; "public administration" would be a modern synonym. Medical and agricultural police needed information on the environment, diet, hygiene, and living conditions of the populace, on agriculture, and on outbreaks of disease.[44] Dozens of state and private institutions arose to fill these
[41] Genevieve Miller, "'Airs, waters and places' in history," Journal of the history of medicine, 17 (1962), 129–40; Frederick Sargent II, Hippocratic heritage: A history of ideas about weather and human health (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982).
[42] Académie royale des sciences, Paris, Mémoires , 1746–54.
[43] Ibid., 1741–81.
[44] George Rosen, "Cameralism and the concept of medical police," and "Mercantilism and health policy in eighteenth-century French thought," From medical police to social medicine: Essays on the history of health care (New York: Science History Publications, 1974), 120–41, 211–9, resp.; see André Bourde, Agronomie et agronomes en France au XVIII siècle , 3 vols. (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1967), 3 , 1533ff., for a discussion of agricultural police in late 18th-century France; L.J. Jordanova, "Earth science and environmental medicine: The synthesis of the late Enlightenment," in L.J. Jordanova and Roy Porter, eds., Images of the earth (Chalfont-St. Giles: British Society for the History of Science, 1979), 119–46, esp. 136; Caroline Hannaway, "Discussion," in Abraham Lilienfeld et al., eds., Times, places, and persons, aspects of the history of epidemiology , supplement to the Bulletin of the history of medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 39–42, on 40; Jean-Pierre Peter, "Disease and the sick at the end of the eighteenth century," in Robert Forster and Orest Ranum, eds., Biology of man in history , transl. Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 103–5.
needs. Climatology became an essential component of their programs. So strong, in fact, was the link between climatology and medicine in France during the 18th century that the French term "température" retained its ancient medical significance: it meant not the degree of heat but the "temperament" or constitution of the atmosphere.[45]
The second stimulus to climatology was exact experimental physics. A call for reform of instruments was sounded by the Genevan meteorologist Jean-André Deluc in 1772, in his Recherches sur les modifications de l'atmosphère , which included extensive historical and critical surveys of barometers and thermometers and his own design for a portable barometer, accurate to between one-eighth and one-sixteenth of a line.[46] Deluc discussed problems of parallax in taking readings and the proper point of the meniscus from which to read the mercury column. He demonstrated the importance of boiling the mercury in the barometer tube, a procedure that multiplied the accuracy of the instrument by a factor of 10. He showed how to use the barometer and thermometer in extensive, systematic measurement, taking all possible precautions to avoid disturbing factors. In order to establish a barometric rule for heights (i.e., a formula relating barometric pressure to altitude), he took over 400 measurements of temperature and pressure at fifteen stations on a mountain near Geneva, using great care in the exposure of the instruments and correcting for the effect of heat on both the barometer and the
[45] Note the title of Malouin's memoirs, "Histoire des maladies épidémiques . . . en même temps que les différentes températures de l'air." See also the usage of the term by Turgot and Cotte and in medical topographies, as discussed below.
[46] Deluc, Recherches . A line is 1/12 inch.
column of air whose height he was measuring. Later he made eighty-seven observations atop Geneva's cathedral. Such methods were a great novelty, and the Recherches were hailed as "a revolution in this part of physics."[47]
The revolution spread quickly. Within a few years Jesse Ramsden, the great English instrument-maker, was constructing barometers accurate to 1/500 or 1/1,000 inch.[48] With them two surveyor-mathematicians, William Roy and George Shuckburgh, measured mountain heights to within 0.2 and 0.7 percent, adopting Deluc's methods and his rule for heights.[49] Hygrometry—the science of measuring humidity—presented greater difficulties than barometry and thermometry, but in the 1770s and 1780s Deluc and Horace Bénédict de Saussure designed reliable, reasonably accurate, and in de Saussure's case, comparable hygrometers. By the 1790s Alessandro Volta was measuring saturation quantities of water vapor and aqueous vapor pressures to within 4.5 percent.[50] Around the same time he and other electricians devised sensitive electrometers, although they were not sure just what their instruments measured.[51] Everyone knows about the adoption of exact instruments and methods in chemistry in France.[52]
These methods transformed experimentation from a descriptive art to a quantitative science. They provided the kind of numerical data that both inspired and confirmed mathematical laws. With their emphasis on discipline, rationalization, and standardization, they were closely related to the bureaucratic impulse of the late Enlightenment.[53]
[47] Cotte, Traité , xii.
[48] Liverpool Papers, British Library, Shuckburgh in Add. MS. 38,481, ff. 1v–4r, Roy Papers, Public Record Office, Kew, MS. WO30/119, f. 26v.
[49] Feldman, "Applied mathematics," 178.
[50] Feldman, The history of meteorology , 106, 71–2.
[51] Heilbron, Electricity, 451.
[52] French chemists relied on instruments made by compatriots—Alexis Megnié and Nicolas Fortin, among others. Their instruments were of a precision comparable to Ramsden's. Cf. Daumas, "Precision measurement."
[53] Charles Gillispie has pointed out that quantification in the late Enlightenment often meant standardization, rationalization, and a "spirit of accountancy." Science and polity in France at the end of the old regime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), esp. chap. 1, sect. 6 and p. 65.
The two reform movements—exact experimental physics and medical and agricultural reform—offered solutions to the most pressing problems of observation and climatology. Instruments were generally more reliable and accurate. Exact experimenters stressed careful specification of their make and scales. Together with the general adoption of the Fahrenheit and Réaumur scales after midcentury, this meant that the readings of different instruments could be reliably compared. The emphasis on discipline in measurement meant that observers would now read their instruments several times daily instead of the single reading common earlier in the century. (Jurin had requested one daily reading by his observers.) They would keep their weather diaries over a period of years rather than submit an out-of-date register covering a single year or less. Bureaucrats in medical and agricultural police were anxious to recruit these observers into their programs and, especially in France, had the means to enforce a proper "labor discipline." A coherent collection of weather observations became possible, and with it a quantitative climatology. A survey of late 18th-century meteorological institutions will show just where and to what degree all these possibilities were realized.
The Smaller Societies
In the German states a number of agricultural, economic, and patriotic societies took up meteorology.[54] Their emphasis on a friendly, amateurish atmosphere and a preponderance of bureaucrats among their membership[55] did not favor rigorous observation. Typically they published occasional weather observations, made with or without instruments, and reports of unusual or hard weather and its effects on crops and public health. The Gesellschaft der Naturforschenden Freunde at Berlin was one of the more active groups. Over two decades (1775–95) the society published some twenty reports of unusual weather, accounts of fog, snow, northern lights,
[54] Henry Lowood gives an excellent account of the more than 200 such societies in Patriotism, profit, and the promotion of science in the German Enlightenment: the economic and scientific societies, 1760–1815 (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1987; DAI 49/06-A, 1563).
[55] Ibid., 39, 76.
and the like, as well as descriptions of improved meteorological instruments. These were brief, elementary discussions. A paper of 1787 used rainfall measurements made in Berlin in the 1730s to find monthly precipitation, numbers of rainy days, and the average precipitation on rainy days of each month.[56] Another contributor described a lightning rod that doubled as an electroscope for atmospheric electricity. He used the apparatus intermittently: "I had no opportunity to observe during the whole of 1791; there were few storms, and [they occurred] at inconvenient times."[57] The use of data half a century old and a casual attitude toward observation suggest that exact experimental physics had not penetrated the Gesellschaft der Naturforschenden Freunde.
Several German societies organized meteorological networks. In Silesia Ignaz Felbiger, abbot of the Monastery of Our Lady at Sagan, established a network under the auspices of the Patriotische Gesellschaft at Breslau. Felbiger's own enthusiasm for meteorology yielded papers on lightning rods, on the art of weather observation, and on the cold winters of 1783–5,[58] and prompted him to correspond frequently with Johann Heinrich Lambert, who advised him about organizing observers.[59] Felbiger saw the project as a second but better Breslauer Sammlung : "with the help of mathematics the necessary instruments and methods of observation have attained a far higher level of perfection since [Kanold's] time; without this exactness and precision it is impossible to compare observations."[60] Felbiger was ambitious: his observers were to record the temperature in Fahrenheit degrees and tenths; the barometer in Paris inches, lines, and tenths; weather conditions and cloud cover; quantity of rain; wind direction and strength; humidity, by means of Lambert's new hygrometer; optical phenomena such as rainbows and haloes; and the phase of the moon. These specifications, which
[56] Rosenthal, "Bestimmung des Ganges des Niederschalges zu Berlin," Gesellschaft der Naturforschenden Freunde, Berlin, Beobachtungen, 7 (1787), 484–9.
[57] J.P. Pelisson, ibid., 398–407.
[58] Hellmann, Repertorium , 126.
[59] Lambert's considerable contributions to meteorology are discussed in Feldman, "Applied mathematics" and The history of meteorology .
[60] Patriotische Gesellschaft, Breslau, Ökonomische Nachrichten, 1 (1773), 2.
would have been impossible a decade earlier, reflect Felbiger's reading of Deluc's newly published Recherches .[61] Felbiger also stipulated standard times of observation—soon after dawn, midday (1–4 p.m.), and evening (around 10 p.m.)—and he provided scales for cloud cover, fog, rain, wind, and snow. He had set his sights too high, however. The few observers responding submitted only occasional contributions and several did not use instruments.[62] An invitation to cooperative weather observation from Prague's patriotic society to "all Bohemian patriots" met with even less success: the organizer found himself alone in supplying the society's journal with observations.[63]
Western European projects achieved better results than did those in central and eastern parts. In France the Société royale d'agriculture de Paris, founded in 1761, had lapsed into inactivity by the 1770s. It was revived in 1785 by a drought and by the growing urgency of agricultural reform. The Intendant of Paris, under whose jurisdiction the Society fell, appointed the energetic Auguste Broussonet as its permanent secretary, and the Academy began publishing Mémoires , holding public meetings, awarding prizes—in short, adopting the demeanor of a learned academy of the Enlightenment.[64] Between 1785 and its demise in 1793, the Society published in its Mémoires eight sets of "Observations géorgico-météorologiques," elicited by questionnaires distributed by the local authorities, and a paper on the cold winter of 1789. The observations, more georgical than meteorological, included detailed topographical descriptions, general monthly accounts of weather, descriptions of the effect of weather on crops and animals, harvest quantities, and grain prices.[65]
[61] Ibid., 79.
[62] For example, Kretzschmer, "Wetterbeobachtungen in Braunau, 1778," Ökonomische Nachrichten , 6 (1778) and Freytag, "Einfluss der Witterung," ibid., 113–4, 180–1, 220–2.
[63] Strnad, "Meteorologische Beobachtungen," 397–9.
[64] Gillispie, Science and polity , 370–1, 375–6.
[65] De Courset (le Baron), "Observations géorgico-météorologiques faites dans le Boulonnais," Société royale d'agriculture, Paris Mémoires , 1786–8; Gallot, "Observations géorgico-météorologiques," ibid., 1787.
The mix of topics illustrates nicely the affinities between meteorology and agriculture.
Bern's Ökonomische Gesellschaft, which included among its members Albrecht von Haller, Daniel Bernoulli, and the important instrument-maker Michel du Crest, organized on a more ambitious scale. Since 1760 the Gesellschaft had published "Observations rurales" from seven towns and villages of the Canton. The observations included qualitative descriptions of the weather and its medical and agricultural effects; tables of monthly rainfall; degree summations of heat and cold at morning, noon, and night; and extremes of temperature and pressure. (Degree summations are sums of temperature readings taken over a given period. They indicate the total amount of heat available to plants and are a characteristic innovation of late 18th-century climatology, with its interest in agricultural applications.) In 1763 the Society resolved "to establish meteorological observers in at least six different places in the Canton, and to supply them with exact instruments." The network was part of a plan to collect information on topography, climate, and disease (i.e., on "airs, waters, and places") and on agricultural and industrial resources. It lasted a decade before submissions petered out.[66]
The Big Projects
These smaller societies lacked personnel and resources for significant meteorological research. The great projects of the late Enlightenment were carried out by institutions that enjoyed generous funding and the full support of the state: the Societas meteorologica palatina and the Société royale de médecine. The Royal Society of London, whose connection with the state was more tenuous, provides an interesting counterpoint.
The Royal Society had maintained its interest in meteorology after the end of Jurin's group, publishing about 150 meteorological papers between 1750 and 1770.[67] Most of these were brief notices of spells
[66] Ökonomische Gesellschaft, Bern, Mémoires , 1763–72; quotation is in Mémoires , 1763, xvii; cf. Lowood, Patriotism , 202–3.
[67] Feldman, The history of meteorology , 213–4.
of unusual or hard weather or of rainbows, haloes, and other optical phenomena, submitted by provincial correspondents. Typical were "Observations of the late severe cold weather" of the winter of 1753–4 and "Concerning a very cold day, and another very hot day" in 1748—observations of at most a few days' weather, reporting only its temperature and general character and using outdated instruments.[68] Between 1750 and 1770 brief reports like these outnumbered meteorological registers (weather diaries covering a longer period) by almost two to one.
The contrast with the two decades after 1770 is striking. Between 1770 and 1790 registers and theoretical and experimental papers on meteorology outnumber brief, descriptive reports by eight to five. Several registers covered five or six years' weather; one spanned ten times as much. Contributors used instruments from the best artisans—Nairne and Ramsden, for example—and took care to describe their construction, calibration, and exposure.[69] Several contributors were on assignment for the East India or Hudson's Bay Companies and observed the weather at their employers' and the Royal Society's request. The arrangement reflects the kind of relations the Society enjoyed with semigovernmental commercial and exploring ventures.[70] The Society published their registers and those of provincial English correspondents in full.
In 1774 the Royal Society began keeping its own register of observations. Henry Cavendish submitted the Society's instruments to an
[68] William Arderon, in PT, 48 (1753–4), 249–50, and Henry Miles, in PT, 46 (1749–50), 208–13, resp.
[69] The six-decade register is Thomas Barker, "Register of the barometer, thermometer, and rain at Lyndon," PT, 61–88 (1771–98); the first year included a register of rainfall from 1736 to 1771. William Roxburgh, "A meteorological diary kept at Fort St. George in the East Indies," PT, 68 (1778), and 80 (1790), observed at three fixed times daily with a Nairne thermometer and Ramsden barometer.
[70] The best known example involving meteorology is reported in Thomas Hutchins, "An account of the success of some attempts to freeze quicksilver, at Albany Fort in Hudson's Bay," PT , 1776, 174–81, and Thomas Hutchins and Charles Blagden, "Experiments for ascertaining the point of mercurial congelation," ibid., 1783, 303–70; Roxburgh at Fort St. George provides another example. See also "Weather observations from Nain and Okak at Labrador," "Meteorological journal kept at Port Jackson in New South Wales," and others, Royal Society of London, Meteorological Archives, mss. 143, 146, etc.
exhaustive exact experimental investigation prior to the institution of twice-daily observations, which continued until 1843.[71] The registers, printed in full in the Philosophical transactions , included readings of exterior and interior thermometers, barometers, hygrometers, and instruments to measure wind, magnetic variation and dip, and rainfall. Together with the contributions of the Society's correspondents, they constituted a far more extensive, detailed, and reliable source of data than had been available earlier in the century. The Society's registers were analyzed by its secretary Samuel Horsley, who calculated monthly mean, extreme, and mean morning and evening temperatures, extreme and mean pressures, the number of days on which the wind blew from each of the sixteen points of the compass, and the proportional rainfall in each month and season of the year.
Horsley also tested for the influence of winds and of the moon on the barometer. The moon was supposed to affect the weather by causing atmospheric tides; because its motions were periodic, a long enough series of observations might reveal correlations that would enable meteorologists to predict the weather. The theory ("so improbable, so destitute of all foundation," wrote Horsley) was eventually discredited, although adherents could be found well into the 19th century. As for the influence of wind direction on the barometer, this hypothesis contributed in the 19th century to the theories of wind rotation of H.W. Dove and others. Counting mean monthly barometer heights and corresponding directions of monthly prevailing winds, Horsley found a correlation: the barometer stood higher in months with winds in the semicircle WSW-W-N-NE; W and NE winds accompanied the greatest mean heights, and in seven months out of twelve the highest barometer reading occurred during a NE wind. Horsley must have been surprised when his count of the number of changes in the weather occurring within three days of the moon's syzygies and quadratures supported the hypothesis of lunar influence. He remarked only that the observations had not continued long enough to draw a firm conclusion.[72]
[71] Henry Cavendish, "An account of the meteorological instruments used at the Royal Society's house," PT, 66 (1776), 375–401; Cavendish, The scientific papers , vol. 2, Chemical and dynamical (Cambridge: The University Press, 1921), 53.
[72] Samuel Horsley, "An abridged state of the weather at London in the year 1774," PT, 65 (1775), 167–93.
While Horsley was calculating, an epidemic—or, more properly, an epizootic—of cattle plague was raging through France. The quarantine and slaughter of thousands of infected cattle became necessary. Anne-Robert Turgot, Louis XVI's minister of finance, encountered bitter resistance from the peasantry; faulty communications between the central authorities and physicians in the provinces further inhibited effective action. In order to direct and enforce the necessary measures, Turgot called forth a Commission de médecine aux maladies epidémiques et epizootiques in 1776. It received letters patent in 1778 as the Société royale de médecine.[73]
The Society was charged with the medical police of France, formerly the responsibility of the intendants. Working through them, it centralized public health policy in a single state agency staffed by trained physicians. Its duties were varied: to regulate the distribution of patent medicines and mineral waters; deploy a network of provincial physicians to gather information on public health and the environment; establish sanitary measures and regulations; advise provincial physicians on the prevention and treatment of epidemics; and, in cases of epidemic outbreaks, coordinate and enforce appropriate measures.[74] The Society also took on all the attributes of a learned academy: titles of membership signed by its president and secretary, medals, prize questions, éloges , and a journal whose title, Histoire de la Société royale de médecine, avec les mémoires de médecine et de physique médicale, echoed that of its elder sister, the Paris Academy of Sciences.
Two aspects of the Society's operations concerned climatology. The first was the construction of "a medical and topographical map of all of France," toward which physicians "of all the cities of the realm" would contribute memoirs "on the nature of their climate (de aere, acquis, et locis ), and on the temperament of those who live
[73] Gillispie, Science and polity , 24–33; Jean-Paul Desaive et al., Médecins, climat et épidémies à la fin du XVIII siècle (Paris: Mouton, 1972), 9; Caroline Hannaway, "The Société Royale de Médecine and epidemics in the Ancien Régime," Bulletin of the history of medecine, 46 (1972), 257–73, on 259ff.
[74] Gillispie, Science and polity , 219ff. and 226ff.; Hannaway, "The Société Royale de Médecine," 258ff.; Desaive et al., Médecins, climat et épidémies , 11–2.
there."[75] The best of these medical topographies, as they were called, won annual prizes from the Society. They might cover nearly 100 pages of text with complete environmental and geographical descriptions of the author's region, including climate and topography, economy, hygiene, and endemic diseases.[76] By the outbreak of the Revolution, 226 topographies had been collected.[77]
The Society's network of provincial physicians also carried out a grand program of meteorological observation. Already in 1775, in the midst of the epidemic, Turgot had tested the waters by distributing questionnaires via the provincial intendants, asking physicians in their jursidictions for "the temperature and the [epidemic] constitution of the years 1772, 1773, 1774, and 1775."[78] The resulting medicometeorological correspondence was continued by the Commission for Epidemics. After 1778, the authors of this correspondence became the Society of Medicine's network of observers.[79]
The direction of the network was undertaken by Louis Cotte, Oratorian priest and France's foremost meteorologist. Just a few years earlier Cotte had published the first textbook of meteorology based on observations—that is, the first to include many observations at all and to derive its discussions of the weather from them.[80] Cotte was especially interested in agricultural applications of meteorology. He had originally planned his Traité de météorologie as an extension of Duhamel's "botanico-meteorological" investigations; it is agriculture, he wrote, "which I have had principally in view in this work." He included medicometeorology as well, excerpting Malouin's
[75] Société royale de médecine, Paris (SRM), Histoire , 1776, xiv; ibid., 1782–3, 6–7.
[76] For example, de Brieude, "Topographie médicale de la Haute-Auvergne," SRM, Mémoires , 1782–3, 257–340.
[77] Hannaway, "The Société Royale de Médecine," 267.
[78] Ibid., 3; "Questions à faire aux médecines," France. Académie nationale de médecine, Archives, SRM Carton 189, dossier 13, number 16.
[79] France. Académie nationale de médecine, Archives, SRM Carton 172, dossiers 1–22 cf. Gillispie, Science and polity , 33, 202–3.
[80] Cotte, Traité de météorologie . Cf. Gustav Hellmann, "Entwicklungsgeschichte des meteorologischen Lehrbuchs," in Hellmann, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Meteorologie, 3 (Berlin, 1922), 1–14, on 1.
memoirs extensively. The goal of meteorology, he believed, is "the perfection of the sciences of agriculture and medicine."[81]
In the Royal Society of Medicine, Cotte had observers to pursue that goal. The requirements he imposed upon them were, in the words of one modern meteorologist, "very strict," and, in the judgment of another, comparable to mid19th-century standards.[82] "It is necessary first of all," Cotte warned, "to have good instruments." A Réaumur mercury thermometer was to be calibrated if possible against the Society's standard; the barometer, calibrated "with the greatest exactitude," should be equipped with a vernier and readable to an accuracy of tenths or twelfths of a line. The Society would recommend reliable artisans on request. Cotte specified the proper exposure for the instruments and set fixed times for observation.[83] "Great exactitude and a spirit of order—these are the principal requirements of the physicist who devotes himself to these sorts of observations."[84] These words might serve as a motto for late-Enlightenment physical science.
Cotte complained more than once that his observers' instruments were not comparable, that observers were not providing "an exact description" of their instruments, that the instruments were "defective. . .supplied by travelling barometer-peddlers." But he had to admire his observers' zeal.[85] By 1785, 150 provincial physicians were participating in the project; about 50 of them observed for more than a decade.[86] Modern climatologists agree that the Society's observers were the elite of the medical profession—otherwise they could not have followed Cotte's instructions at all. They generated a great mass of observations over the whole of France—the largest collection, most likely, prior to the foundation of national meteorological bureaus in the mid19th century. From these observations
[81] Cotte to Macquer, 25 Aug 1768, France. Bibliothèque nationale, ms. Fr. 12305, ff. 209–11; Cotte, Traité de météorologie , ix, xvii.
[82] Desaive et al., Médecins, climat et épidémies , 90; J.A. Kington, "A late eighteenth-century source of weather data," Weather, 25 (1970), 169–75.
[83] SRM, Histoire , 1776, xi–xiv.
[84] Cotte, Traité de météorologie , 517.
[85] SRM, Histoire , 1777–8, 104; ibid., 1782–3, 245–6; ibid., 1784–5, 204.
[86] Ibid., 203; Peter, "Disease and the sick," 85, 87.
meteorologists have been able to reconstruct the climate of France in the last years of the Old Regime.[87]
Cotte did not publish these observations in full; "Tables are not pleasant for the reader," he said, echoing Derham across a half-century.[88] Instead he published monthly summaries of the weather at each reporting location, including its "temperature" in terms of the Hippocratic categories cold and wet, cold and dry, warm and wet, and warm and dry, along with the usual means, extremes, and descriptions of diseases. Although the summaries resembled those of Derham's time, they were more plentiful and more consistent. Cotte arranged them in great tables (tables were not to be dispensed with entirely) that amounted to the first descriptions of the climate of a nation based on detailed, regular observations.
Cotte's tables represented a collection of data dense enough over a sufficient area to reveal something of the importance of space for the weather. "These extreme temperatures take place," he said, "at the same time over a very great extent of country."[89] This remark, made early in the Society's career, sounds like one of Derham's coincidences, only it covers more ground. A few years later Cotte wrote that the tables showed clearly "the influence of great variations of the atmosphere over a very great extent of country on the thermometer, and principally on the barometer."[90] These isolated suggestions mark the limit of Cotte's insight. He did not draw from the tables a description of the climate of France. Moreover, the tables' monthly means and extremes could not reveal the density of the weather in time. Because Cotte did not publish the full record of observations, his observers' efforts were of as little use to other meteorologists as they seem to have been to himself. They lay hidden in the Society's archives until climatologists began to explore them around the middle of the present century.
[87] Desaive et al., Médecins, climat et épidémies , 40–2, 97. O. Muller, ibid., has submitted the Society's observations to correlation analysis. Many, especially those of Paris and the Ile de France, show a correlation coefficient of 0.8 and higher.
[88] Cotte, Traité de météorologie , 517.
[89] "Temperature" here is taken in a broad sense to include barometric pressure, rains, storms, and drought. SRM, Histoire , 1777, 105.
[90] SRM, Histoire , 1780, 261.
The Societas meteorologica palatina has enjoyed greater fame than its French sister, in part because it was an international organization whose members were the chief scientific institutions of Europe (more on this below). More significantly, the Palatine Society published the full record of its members' observations, which were excellent and became a valuable resource for 19th-century meteorologists.[91] The Society was a product of a late 18th-century enlightened state, the principality of the Palatinate or Kurpfalz. Cultural life flourished there under the patronage of the Elector Karl Theodor, who was keen on science and its contribution to his subjects' welfare.[92] Mannheim, Karl Theodor's capital, was one of Germany's centers of culture; the Elector lavished on it an Akademie der Wissenschaften, a Deutsche Gesellschaft, and a Deutsches Theater, and brought Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to write and play for him. He furnished an astronomical observatory with English instruments, then the best in the world, and directed his court chaplain and ecclesiastical councillor, Johann Jakob Hemmer, to assemble a cabinet de physique and offer lectures and demonstrations.[93] In the 1770s Hemmer investigated the electricity of flames, of dew, and of the atmosphere, and he was largely responsible for the erection of lightning rods throughout the Elector's extensive realm. His book on the subject went through two editions. Many German rulers bought it for distribution in their principalities.[94]
The idea for a Palatine meteorological society may have come from neighboring Baden. There, in 1778, the Karlsruhe professor of mathematics and physics Johann Böckmann founded the Badische
[91] For example, H.W. Brandes derived the first synoptic analysis of European weather in 1823 from the Society's record for the year 1783. See Brandes, Beiträge zur Witterungskunde (Leipzig, 1820).
[92] Hellmann, Repertorium , 896.
[93] David Cassidy, "Meteorology in Mannheim," 12; Hellmann, Repertorium , 193.
[94] J.J. Hemmer, Anleitung, Wetterleiter an allen Gattungen von Gebäuden auf die sicherste Art anzulegen (Mannheim, 1786, 1788). Cited by Adolf Kistner, Die Pflege der Naturwissenschaften in Mannheim zur Zeit Karl Theodors (Mannheim: Selbstverlag des mannheimer Altertumsverein, 1930), 87; Cassidy, "Meteorology in Mannheim," 14–5.
Witterungsanstalt, a network of sixteen observers within the margravate.[95] The project failed for lack of funds, but it probably inspired Hemmer, who hired Böckmann's instrument-maker and placed his own plans before the Elector.[96] Karl Theodor, who himself kept a weather diary, approved, and in 1780 the Societas meteorologica palatina received its charter as a three-member "Meteorologische Klasse" in the Mannheim Akademie der Wissenschaften. Hemmer, the Society's secretary, recruited observers, oversaw the construction of instruments for them, and edited the annual Ephemerides meteorologicae .
The Society's work was a model of exact experimental method. Hemmer followed Deluc closely in specifications for instruments. "We shall always search for ways to make observations more exact," he declared, "both for the sake of agriculture and for our health." Tubes of barometers and thermometers were to be exactly cylindrical, carefully cleaned, and filled with pure, boiled mercury, and the scales carefully prepared and exactly measured. Barometers were to be read to tenths of a line with the vernier against the cusp of the meniscus and thermometers to tenths of a degree. Care was to be taken to prevent disturbances from the observer's breath or candle. Observers could use their own instruments if they met these standards. Hemmer nonetheless dispatched to each of them a packet of instruments "whose comparability has been assured, sparing no expense": a barometer with correcting thermometer (the thermometer to correct for the effect of heat on the barometer), two thermometers (for exposure in sun and shade), and a hygrometer of Deluc's design (using a goose-feather quill that expanded with humidity). Selected observers received a magnetic declination compass as well. Hemmer also asked participants to observe wind direction and strength, cloud cover, precipitation and evaporation, river level, lunar phase, and medical and agricultural conditions. Hours of observation were set at 7 a.m., 2 p.m., and 9 p.m.; Hemmer supplied scales for wind
[95] J.L. Böckmann, Beiträge zur neuesten Geschichte der Witterungslehre (Karlsruhe, 1781), cited in Hellmann, Repertorium , 889.
[96] Kistner, Die Pflege der Naturwissenschaften , 96–8; Cassidy, "Meteorology in Mannheim," 17–8.
strength and cloud cover and symbols for precipitation and other "meteors."[97]
Along with these exacting specifications went a new strategy of recruitment. In order to secure continuity in observations, Hemmer invited scientific institutions rather than individuals to participate; each institution would appoint one of its members to observe. No fewer than thirty-seven academies, universities, and monasteries in Europe and America responded, and Hemmer soon had an international network staffed by the world's capable workers. Their registers—reliable, uniform, and, in a number of cases, extending over a decade—appeared in extenso in the Society's Ephemerides . This was a "princely plan of operations," in the words of the 19th-century meteorologist John Daniell,[98] carried out at princely expense: 1,500 gulden annually for the Ephemerides alone, or about a third more than the salary of a senior member of France's Académie royale des sciences.[99] The resulting collection, wrote Daniell, "contain[ed] more data for a correct history of the weather than all other works on the same subject taken together."[100] Such was the stature of the Palatine Society that its hours of observation—the so-called "Mannheim hours"—and the "Mannheim cloud cover and wind scales" were widely adopted and remained in use for more than a century.
Several of Hemmer's observers carried out extensive climatological analyses of their own weather records. Typical was the contribution of Nicholas de Béguelin of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. He reported monthly maxima and minima for the thermometer and barometer, their monthly ranges, and annual and monthly means; the same for morning and evening thermometrical observations, together with maximum diurnal range; for the hygrometer and magnetic needle monthly mean morning, afternoon, and evening values, the mean of all three, and monthly extremes and extreme ranges; and monthly
[97] Societas meteorological palatina, Ephemerides meteorologicae, 1 (1781), 21, 7–14. See Hellmann, Repertorium , 898.
[98] John Daniell, Meteorological essays , 3d ed., 2 vols. (1845), 305.
[99] Cassidy, "Meteorology in Mannheim," 19; for salaries, see Heilbron, Electricity , 117, 122.
[100] Daniell, Meteorological essays , 305.
frequencies for each direction and degree of wind strength and for each degree of cloud cover, all according to Hemmer's scales.[101] Participants contributed a wealth of other material, which Hemmer published indiscriminately: ten years' tidal observations from Padua, hourly barometric measurements over an entire month, hourly observations of magnetic declination from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., Hemmer's own measurements of atmospheric electricity, and van Swinden's collection of temperature observations taken four and five times daily in nine Belgian towns during a cold spell in December 1783. From analyses of contributors' registers, Hemmer's assistant Karl König published tables like Cotte's but far more complete. A single table for each reporting location presented monthly summaries. A "general table" of all locations showed annual extremes, means, and ranges; extremes of monthly means for barometer, thermometer, and declination-needle; annual rainfall and prevailing winds; monthly sums of degrees of heat; and frequencies of wind strength and direction, "meteors," and cloud cover.
Although the collection was something of a miscellany, the observations and analyses were more consistent and rigorous than anything earlier in the century. In them we can see the first hints of a discipline of climatology: a standard and consistent practice in the gathering and analysis of weather data. This practice is reflected in the emergence of a standard set of climatological variables calculated by meteorologists such as Béguelin, König, and Horsley. Their work marks the beginning of a quantitative climatology.
The new climatology provided some definitive answers to old questions. Van Swinden, in an independent investigation, and two contributors to the Society's Ephemerides examined barometric observations taken five, six, and eighteen times daily over a year or more. They refuted the hypothesis of lunar influence but confirmed the diurnal variation, a daily fluctuation of the barometer that several earlier meteorologists thought they saw in their data.[102] These analyses
[101] Ephemerides , 1784, appendix, 3–6.
[102] Van Swinden, Mémoire sur les observations météorologiques faites à Franeker pendant le courant de l'année MDCCLXXIX (Amsterdam: M.M. Rey, 1780), 34; Joh. Jac. Planer, "Observatio oscillationis mercurii," Ephemerides , 1783, 250–7; Vincent Chiminiello, "De diurna nocturnaque oscillatione barometri," ibid., 1784, 230–4.
exploited the density of observations in time . The coverage of observations in space led meteorologists to a greater appreciation of its role in the weather. They could now trace the paths of weather events from one end of Europe to the other: the cold wave of the winter of 1775–6, for example, and the famous hailstorm of 13 July 1788, which by destroying crops across the most fertile regions of France contributed significantly to the trouble preceding the Revolution.[103] And they arrived at a clear statement of the spatial extent and of the motion of barometric variation. "Anyone who carefully examines and compares the barometric observations in volume I of the meteorological Ephemerides ," proclaimed Coelestin Steiglehner, "cannot fail to conclude that oscillations longer than one day extend over many places of diverse longitude and latitude."
From observations at London, Regensburg, and St. Petersburg, Steiglehner determined that a barometric minimum occurring around Christmas 1775 had traveled from west to east, striking each town in succession. Further analysis of data from London, Regensburg, St. Gotthard, Buda, Mannheim, and Vienna confirmed the rule "early in the west, late in the east."[104] F.X. Epp had drawn a similar conclusion from the observations of the network of twenty-four Bavarian observers he directed. The Churbayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften, a sister society to the Mannheim Academy after Karl Theodor inherited Bavaria in 1777,[105] established the network in the same year that the Palatine Society was chartered. From parallel barometric motions recorded by his observers Epp concluded that the causes of barometric variation extend over wide regions, perhaps over
[103] Van Swinden, Observations sur le froid rigoreux du mois de janvier, MDCCLXXVI (Amsterdam: M.M. Rey, 1779), 5–6; Cotte, in the "Feuille météorologique" of the Journal de france , cited in Buissart, "Mémoire sur l'orage du treize juillet, 1788," France. Académie nationale de médecine, SRM carton 141, dossier 40. On effects of the hailstorm, see Robert D. Harris, Necker and the revolution of 1789 (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986), 273; Michel Vovelle, The fall of the French monarchy 1787–1782 , transl. Susan Burke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 86.
[104] Coelestin Steiglehner, "Excerpta ex dissertatione: atmosphaerae pressio varia," Ephemerides , 444–57.
[105] See James E. McClellan III, Science reorganized. Scientific societies in the eighteenth century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 118.
hemispheres. He confirmed this conclusion by examining one month's barometric variations in five European towns, the data for which he found in the Palatine Society's Ephemerides.[106]
Finally, a few meteorologists began to synthesize descriptions of regional climates from observations. The Society of Medicine's medical topography project aimed at a "medical and topographical map of all of France." Van Swinden planned to determine the climate of Frisia from his own observations, and from others' observations throughout Holland he began to construct a picture of its provincial climates.[107] Epp expected from his collection "a more exact knowledge of [Bavaria's] climate" and of the "physical character of the land."[108] If the stations were properly distributed the observations would yield information on local climates as well.[109] None of these projects, however, was completed.