Studying the weather in the 18th century meant doing so politely – having a cultural marker that set you off from the common mass – John Pointer dismissed claims that storms represented armies fighting in the air as "barbarous" or "vulgar". Another commentator complained that "in the last Century it as ...a prevailing Opinion among the Vulgar that the Winds were in some measure, under the direction of the internal spirits". Appropriate records and scientific investigation and explanation could, these men (and they were nearly all men – Margaret Mackenzie of Delvine, Perthshire, who kept a meticulous temperature record at her home from 1780 to 1802 being a rare exception about whom Golinski unfortunately tells us no more) banish such misunderstandings.
Although, of course, the science was far from up to the job. The great summer haze of 1783 cause, we now know, by a dust and gas plume from a volcanic fissure in Iceland, was beyond 18th-century science's powers of explanation, although Benjamin Franklin did get it right, but it seems no one believed him. One newspaper called it a "universal Perturbation in Nature".
While this is clearly a solidly grounded academic work, Golinski provides plenty of colour to leaven his account, which is interesting enough in its own terms (and he's blessed short on academic jargon). So he tells us about Thomas Barker (1722-1809), squire of Lyndon Hall in the county of Rutland, who took his dedication to weather recording, as to other scientific experiments. "Twice a day, month after month, year after year, Barker read his thermometer and barometer, at times that he measure to the minute..." There were however occasional interruptions, as on his marriage in 1751 to the sister of Gilbert White. His recording here was less meticulous, however: he wrote in his diary "at Selbourne, etc". (What Anne White thought or perhaps wrote about the marriage unfortunately doesn't seem to have survived.)
But this scientific dedication soon became captured by fashion. In a chapter I found particularly fascinating, since in my Australian youth I recall the purchase of a barometer as being something regarded as a "classy", "upmarket" thing, Golinski charts how the instrument acquired this status within years of its invention. In 1766 it was described as "both in Regard of Curiosity and Utility .. the first in Dignity among the modern Philosophical Inventions". (What we now call science having then of course been called "natural philosophy".)
Golinski also looks into the (long) period when bad air was blamed for diseases such as cholera and malaria – in science that had the basics wrong, but was actually going in the right direction, her records efforts in "pneumatic chemistry" led by Stephen Hales, curate at Teddington in Middlesex from 1709 to 1761. He designed a machine for ventilating shops' holds, prisons and hospitals. Associated with this was a belief that "fixed air" (carbon dioxide) could cure diseases, including scurvy. So it was that the great Joseph Priestley invented a method of producing soda water – machines using his technique ("gasogenes") followed the barometer in racing into homes, so we can blame him for the modern curse of the soft drink...
Article comments
1 - El Bicho
Great job. I enjoy reading work that inspires me to work harder on my own writing.
2 - tink
Interesting subject...your review was an 'enlightening' read.