The Weather Experiment

The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future

By: Peter Moore

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Paperback | 21 June 2016

At a Glance

Paperback
416 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 3.18

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In 1865 Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy's storm warning system and "forecasts" would return, the model for what we use today.
In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God's wrath, nineteenth-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma. Buoyed by the achievements of the Enlightenment, a generation of mavericks set out to decipher the secrets of the atmosphere and predict the future. Among them were Luke Howard, the first to classify clouds; Francis Beaufort, who quantified the winds; James Glaisher, who explored the upper atmosphere in a hot-air balloon; Samuel Morse, whose electric telegraph gave scientists the means by which to transmit weather warnings; and FitzRoy himself, master sailor, scientific pioneer, and founder of the U.K.'s national weather service.
Reputations were built and shattered. Fractious debates raged over decades between scientists from London and Galway, Paris and New York. Explaining the atmosphere was one thing, but predicting what it was going to do seemed a step too far. In 1854, when a politician suggested to the Commons that Londoners might soon know the weather twenty-four hours in advance, the House roared with laughter.
Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment navigates treacherous seas and rough winds to uncover the obsession that drove these men to great invention and greater understanding.

Industry Reviews

"Moore is the rare science writer who can describe dew point so poetically you feel you're with him in a twinkling field of white clover on a cool summer morning. Moore's history is just as evocative, and full of wisdom for modern times." --Cynthia Barnett, The New York Times Book Review

"[An] elegantly constructed group biography . . . recalls the best of its genre." --Mike Jay, The Wall Street Journal

"[A] spirited new book . . . [Moore] is a gifted writer with a nifty turn of phrase." --Matthew Price, The Boston Globe

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