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Book Review
Wed Oct 15, 2003
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, David Laskin peruses a new weather
tome.
Of course I knew about Ben Franklin and his kite and the huge weather map that the
Smithsonian's first director Joseph Henry updated each day when the readings arrived by
telegraph. But until I read John D. Cox's fascinating book Storm Watchers, I had no idea that
there were so many colorful characters involved in the science of meteorology. Take Luke
Howard, a 19th century English Quaker who was far more interested in clouds than in his day
job manufacturing pharmaceutical chemicals. In 1802, Howard put his passion to work in a
system of cloud nomenclature that is still used today. Then there's Elias Loomis, the Ohio
math professor whose detailed study comparing two storms in February, 1842 contained the first
synoptic weather maps.
My favorite storm watcher is the painfully shy William Ferrel, who emerged from the depths of
rural Tennessee to publish what Cox calls an "epoch-making explanation of the general
circulation of the atmosphere." I had no idea that one of the originators of geophysical
fluid dynamics was a poor 19th century farmboy who taught himself physics by making diagrams
with the prongs of a pitchfork. The most heartbreaking figure here is Robert FitzRoy, a
British naval officer who came under such sharp attack for issuing daily forecasts from the
new Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, that he slit his throat in 1865.
"The storm watchers deserve to be remembered," writes Cox, "many of them as heroes." Even the
ones who aren't heroes make for inspiring company in the pages of this memorable book.
Our show is funded by Subaru and The National Science Foundation.
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