The Invention of Clouds

by Richard Hamblyn

Details the true story of a timid young Quaker and amateur meteorologist named Luke Howard who was hurled into the spotlight when he assigned poetic names to the clouds in December 1802, which became a landmark in natural history and meteorology and caused him to become immortalized in the works of the Romantics. 12,500 first printing.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Nature, Biography, Historical, History Of Science

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Richard Hamblyn studied at the universities of Essex and Cambridge, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on 18th-century topographical writing. His first book, The Invention of Clouds (2001) told the story of Luke Howard, the amateur meteorologist who named the clouds in 1802; his other publications include The Cloud Book (2008) and Extraordinary Clouds (2009), both published in association with the (UK) Met Office; Data Soliloquies (2009), co-written with the digital artist Martin John Callanan; and Terra: Tales of the Earth, a collection of stories about major natural disasters. His anthology, The Art of Science: A Natural History of Ideas, was published by Picador in October 2011. It is a wide-ranging collection of readable science writing from the Babylonians to the Higgs boson.

Reviews

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Invention of Clouds is the true story of Luke Howard, the amateur English meteorologist who in 1802 gave the clouds their names -- cumulus, cirrus, stratus. He immediately gained international fame, becoming a cult figure among artists and painters -- Goethe, Constable, and Coleridge revered him -- and legitimizing the science of meteorology. Part history of science, part cultural excavation, this is not only the biography of a man, but of a moment: the cultural birth of the modern scientific era.

My Review: Late eighteenth century London was an amazingly fertile place, with many concurrent revolutions burgeoning, and knowledge as such becoming an object of trade, almost, it was seen as so very desirable and advantageous to possess a new piece of it. The idea of scientific study of the natural world was relatively new, but had already made very solid and quite impressive inroads into the public consciousness. No longer was a person pursuing research into the material world liable to excite unwelcome and potentially hazardous attention from religious authorities. The world was open at last to apparently limitless desire of humans to ask questions and seek answers.

Into that atmosphere was born Luke Howard, a scion of a stolid, solid, money-making Quaker (more accurately called "Dissenters") family. He was cursed with unquenchable curiosity in a religious sect that valued the practical over the notional, and obedience over personal happiness. (Depressingly familiar, eh what?) His childhood fascination with clouds was subsumed into the coerced "need" that his wealthy father felt for Luke to have a trade.

Nonetheless, Luke pursued his passion for observing clouds, in time falling in with the other members of his age and class and religion who were among the vanguard of scientific researches (eg, William Allen, Richard Phillips, WH Pepys) at that moment, largely due to their cultural isolation from more mainstream pursuits by faith and the laws of the day. His friend and business partner William Allen had founded something called The Askesian Society, where Howard presented a lecture in December 1802 that set the world on its ear: He proposed and defended a naming system for the clouds that, with minor extensions, we use to this good day.

Not bad for a 30-year-old ne'er-do-well (per his father) who was pathologically shy and unwilling to be "famous."

The hardcover is a beautiful looking little book, in a landscape trim, illustrated with paintings, etchings, and drawings of the clouds; it's a nicely written explanation of the science of nephology (the study of clouds) and its relationship to meteorology (the study of weather overall); and it's just plain interesting to read about how outsiders and the marginalized have always, it seems, been the pointers to huge advances in the arts and sciences.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a cloud-watcher, it was fun to learn about how the classification of clouds came about. I had never once considered that there was a time when people didn't know what clouds were or how they worked or that there were patterns to them - which shows me yet again how ignorant I am.

[Judith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written for the general audience, this book is more than just a telling of how clouds came to be named (e.g. cumulus, nimbus). It is the story of the beginning of meteorology, reviewing prior attempts to explain and identify clouds and weather in general, beginning with Assyrian times. This recounting highlights Howard's invention of cloud names and identification of the different types of clouds, which is difficult to do as they are evanescent things. I was interested to find that so many people in the past have been fascinated by clouds but stumped by what they are, how they arise and dissipate. Naming things, that is, distinguishing between objects under study, is the ground step for studying; one needs a vocabulary to discuss the objects of study.

A second theme is the fact that early scientific study in the 1700's and 1800's was actually what we call today "citizen science". There were no scientists as such, but dedicated enthusiasts about one or another phenomenon that he (and it was usually a he; women so engaged were hardly recognized other than as assistants, perhaps, to brothers or husbands) studied. If one had the interest and the self-discipline, anyone could be a "scientist". And so it was with Howard. It takes a lot of self-discipline to record temperatures, cloud appearances, and other weather phenomena every day. (Howard also found that urban dwellings and concentration of individual house and manufactory fires raised urban temperatures above those of the country.)

A third theme is that of the "spin-offs" of his study of clouds. Once his classification was accepted, with necessary modifications (e.g. cirrostratus), the study of winds and their nomenclature and how to distinguish one from another began. Howard was influenced by the Linnaean system of species' nomenclature; his classification influenced the nomenclature and description of winds, so necessary for the study of weather, especially at sea.

Only 253 pages, but what a lot of difference Howard's fascination with clouds begat!

[Anne White · Rating 4 out of 5]

My last book of 2018! It got more interesting as it went on, with bits about Napoleon, Goethe (he was a Howard fan), Constable, a trip to the Lake District, maybe even a meeting with Jane Austen. I skimmed over the Beaufort wind scale chapter, but the rest was quite absorbing.

[Fatima · Rating 3 out of 5]

That was insightful, I liked it even though it took me two years to read.

[Franz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would give 4.5 stars if I could as I quite enjoyed this book. Not too many people likely heard of Luke Howard, and in essence his (only) claim to fame is that he came up with a scientific nomenclature of clouds. This "invention" then made the science of meteorology possible and respectable.

As a biography, the book is probably too long and Luke Howard's life could be fully covered in a much thinner publication. But then again, nowhere in the title does Richard Hamblyn indicate that his book is a biography of Luke Howard; rather, the book is very appropriately called "The Invention of Clouds", and the subtitle refers to an "amateur meteorologist" only. All in all, Richard Hamblyn did an outstanding job characterizing the cultural, social etc. environment of Luke Howard's time, and this made for a very interesting read. I enjoyed the book, I enjoyed the writing, and I learned a lot. What else can I ask for in a book?

[Justin Howe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exactly what it says it is: the story of how two hundred years ago an amateur meteorologist developed the language to describe clouds. Enjoyable and I definitely recommend it for people that enjoy the history of science.

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Biography and history of Luke Howard, whose lecture in 1802 codified the types of clouds. Bonus bit on Beaufort, who similarly codified wind.

In addition to Howard's life, the book covers some of how clouds were classified before his lecture, and competing ideas after. We still use his classifications today, with only minor changes. The book also has a little science about clouds, but that isn't the majority of the book by any means.

I liked the book, but it wasn't compelling - I started and finished 10 other books before completing this one. The illustrations are nice, but would be better in color. Probably the most interesting part for me were the scientific clubs in the early 19th century.

[Annie Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite history of science books, setting the beginnings of meteorology in its cultural context. For a complete review, with quotations, see my blog post here: http://anniekateshomeschoolreviews.co...

This book has also gotten me to revisit Constable the painter and the luminous skies in his paintings.

[Stephen Case · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finished this book on an overcast evening. By the time I was done, the setting sun had broken through the clouds to reveal a strikingly three-dimensional panorama of torn vapor and gold. It was a cloudscape, the kind I try to capture in my stories “Unborn God” and “The Wizard’s House”—part of a series I’m calling Cartography of Clouds that will be published shortly in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It was also a fitting backdrop to the conclusion of this book on the history of attempts to name and categorize these most fleeting of natural phenomena.

The nineteenth century was a heyday of classification schemes in natural philosophy. If one could accurately name and organize objects, one could ensure that observations of them were uniform around the world. In astronomy this involved attempts to measure star positions as accurately as possible, but it also led to schemes for measuring double star positions and stellar brightness and developing a more rational way to divide up the heavens into constellations. (I discuss a lot of this in my dissertation, which I will be defending very shortly.)

In biology, a similar categorizing impetus gave rise to the Linnaean system of classifying organisms. Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds tells the story of doing the same thing for the changing skies. If weather observations were to develop into a uniform science of meteorology, there needed to be some way to accurately designate and compare cloud forms. But the clouds are by their very nature always changing and each one seems different. What sort of natural scheme of division could be devised for these objects?

The book focuses one individual, the Quaker merchant and natural philosopher Luke Howard, and how Howard devised, promoted, and propagated the cloud divisions (cumulus, stratus, cirrus, etc.) that have since passed into common and official usage. On one level, Hamblyn’s work is a fairly simple (though at times romanticized) tale: Howard developed his classification, presented it in a lecture, published it in a philosophical magazine, and ultimately found success. It is a straightforward story but one that illustrates what the scientific endeavor looked like in the early nineteenth century.

This is a popularization of the history of science. There’s no discussion of previous work done on Luke Howard (a figure I admit I had never heard of before this book) or discussion of the archives or source materials the author utilized. As a popularization though, it does a good job of using Howard’s life and work to illustrate how science worked during this period. The reader gets a sense of the popular interest in amateur science—in particular meteorology—and the world of scientific periodicals through which Howard rose to fame. More compellingly for me though was what it showed about the impetus for classification and categorizing during this period, the drive to obtain a uniformity of observations that could bring objectivity to nature.

Besides Howard’s cloud classification scheme, Hamblyn also touches on quantitative measurement for wind speed, though he does not discuss earlier attempts to gather worldwide temperature and barometric observations or the instrumentation that made this possible. These early attempts (partially coordinated by John Herschel during his time at the Cape of Good Hope) had much in common with contemporary attempts to gather global data on the Earth’s magnetic field and worldwide tidal levels. These were important aspects in the narrative toward uniformity and quantification that Hamblyn is constructing in this work, and I would have welcomed more discussion of how Howard’s own endeavors related to these activities of “big science”.

Hamblyn represents Luke Howard as a romantic hero of science, someone who brought scientific rigor the clouds without sacrificing their sublime aspects. This claim is buttressed by his discussion of the ways in which Howard’s work influenced the writings of such varied and prominent figures as Goethe in Germany and the English landscape painter John Constable. In parts of the work, however, this romanticization of Howard’s life and work is taken a bit far. In the sense of literary effect, this is not too much of a problem. It becomes more difficult, however, when Hamblyn takes liberties with his source materials to connect dots related to the influence or motivations of his characters. Phrases like “Howard surely thought” or “certainly felt” litter the narrative.

Whether you’re interested in the history of science or simply want to know more about how the clouds were brought within the remit of natural philosophy, this is an accessible and compelling work. If you’re hoping to learn more about the physical nature and structure of the clouds themselves though, this may not be the place to start. The focus is on Howard and the human aspect of science—showing how the scientific is often tied closely with the ascetic. It is a book about the naming of clouds, only secondarily about the physical understanding of clouds. Like so many other things in science though, Hamblyn effectively shows how objects must be named before it can be understood.

[Colleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author takes what is essentially a biography of the man who came up with the cloud classification system and expands it so that it encompasses an exploration of the romantic age, with nods to scientists like Darwin and Beaufort and also to artists like Constable and Wordsworth and to those like Goethe who managed to be both scientists and artists.Enjoyed.

[Jobiska (Cindy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was interesting--an insight both into meteorological history and (of interest to me) Quaker history. Excellently researched and structured...really delves into both the roots of meteorology and Howard's background and personality.



I read the hardcover edition, the one depicted here, and I cannot for the life of me figure out why someone designed a book that was over an inch thick, about 5 inches high, and 8 inches wide. It hurt my hands to hold this book while reading it! I'm jealous of those who read it in paperback! This book also has the dubious distinction of being the first one I had to read with reading glasses :-( .



Borrowed from the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting library.

[Kieu]

For a history book, Richard Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds is highly readable. Despite the numerous characters that make an appearance, all the tangential but relevant details, and the breadth of the subject, Hamblyn is able to present a coherent and fascinating narrative. Because historical events cannot happen in isolation, by focusing on how the clouds came to be named, Hamblyn has painted a portrait of scientific culture in the early 19th century, the birth of modern meteorology, and the obsessions of the individuals who made it possible.

Read the rest of my review here: http://www.fromlefttowrite.com/book-r...

[Julie Barrett · Rating 3 out of 5]

The invention of clouds, how an amateur meteorologist forged the language of the skies by Richard Hamblyn
Talks a bit about the 4 different cloud formations but more about the amateur meteorologist and his life.
I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).

[Nacho Morato · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante ensayo sobre la vida de Luke Howard, cómo clasificó y nombró las nubes, todos lo problemas que surgieron y como se llega a la nomenclatura actual.

Todo ello, explicando la sociedad d la época, como se vivía la ciencia y sus adelantos y las relaciones entre las diferentes personalidades que fueron muchas.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

In December 1802, Luke Howard delivered a lecture that outlined a scientific classification of the types of clouds. That system, with modifications, is still used today. This book tells Luke Howard's story. It also covers previous attempts to describe clouds. Luke Howard became something of a celebrity, much to his dismay. Other chapters in the book describe Howard's influence on poets like Wordsworth and Shelley, the painter John Constable, and the author Johann van Goethe.

Another chapter describes Francis Beaufort's development of a classification system for wind and its effects. The Beaufort Scale, with modifications, is also still used today.

If you're interested in clouds, weather, or science history, you'll enjoy this book.

[Peter Papageorgiou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yet another book I loved! As a sailor I have a keen interest in the weather and some meteorological knowledge beyond your average everyday stuff.... This well written historical and scientific book on the life of Luke Howard and how he gave us the classification of clouds that we use even today, is great! The writer is obviously enthusiastic about his subject and this comes across!! I enjoyed reading it very much... Towards the end mention is made of how photography made cloud classification even better, I wonder what the first meteorologists like Mr Howard himself would have thought if they had had access to today's modern timelapse sequences of clouds...

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary book about an extraordinary person who took it up to himself to study the forms of clouds. The book is about about the solo adventure of Luke Howard to understand why clouds change form and what drives their formation. The result is a stellar classification of clouds that inspired the setup of the modern meteorology.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing in the end. Because there's little to say, in a way, about who and what, the author tries to stretch it all, which ends up being a bit thin at times. There lacks an organising theme, perhaps (it has an organising topic, but that's not the same). Nice enough, but as it hesitates between genres, or subjects, it ends up feeling slightly...flimsy - like a cloud?

[Robert Craven · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fascinating insight into how modern classification of cloud became standard in the late 18th, early 19th century .

Hamblyn, like Andrea Wulfe in her own The Brother Gardeners captures the age of enlightenment and the dedicated souls who looked around and examined nature.

excellent little book on a subject we rarely thing about but if we look up, see it everywhere.

[Rhiannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

this was a bit of a slog to get through for me but I think if you are very interested in the history of science you would enjoy this. I did appreciate the discussions of how art and science intersect. I do think it's funny that Luke Howard and his fascination with just staring at the sky is exactly like me and every other meteorologist I know, we're all the same in that regard.

[Mark Rowney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very enjoyable, remarkably informative, and written with enthusiasm for the subject. My only gripe being that I found it wandered somewhat, much like a cloud, and I would have preferred a less time-wandered telling along a fixed timeline. Highly recommended none the less.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting history of clouds. Full review at https://scientificgems.wordpress.com/...

[Paula Peckham · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the few non-fiction books I've read (relatively speaking). It was interesting and not at all boring or lecture-ish. I found it a fascinating read.

[Pat Cummings · Rating 5 out of 5]

You call the wispy high clouds of the December sky “cirrus”. So does the German, Spaniard, Russian, Afrikaner… We have a common language for speaking of clouds due to a remarkable Quaker chemist, Luke Howard, who codified and named clouds (in Latin, the scientific language then and now) according to the behavior he had observed.

In The Invention of Clouds , Richard Hamblyn tells us not only about the life, times and work of this amateur meteorologist, but also about his remarkable colleagues in science.

Howard lived in London at the end of the 18th century, when the intellectual life of Europe was aboil with new theories of natural philosophy—science—and young intellectuals found their way to the coffee-house to debate their favorites in a heady atmosphere of stock trading, tobacco-smoking, drug experimentation and science.

The Royal Society was nearly one hundred years old, and was essentially closed to the Quaker Howard. In any case, it was the society for “old fogies”; the coffee-house set formed dozens of societies of their own. Howard was “discovered” by Alexander Tilloch, a Scottish-born publisher and magazine editor, who then introduced his work to the Askesian Society, a group founded by three Quakers specifically as a debating club. The Askesians preferred a more interactive inquiry than the sedate Royal Society functions. Howard’s first presentation of “On Modifications of Clouds” was made in this hurly-burly venue.

Hamblyn makes clear that it is not only Howard’s work that is seminal in this tale. The birth of the scientific journal (Alexander Tilloch), the explosion of interest in science (the Askesian and other societies), the growth of the stock trade as a basis for endeavor, even the rise of the naturalist school of painting, all have their place.

Altogether, The Invention of Clouds is a thoroughly fascinating glimpse of the transformational second wave of communication. For those of us surfing the third wave, it has a strongly familiar flavor.

Liner Notes:
Other books of interest about this period are The Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow, about this Birmingham science society of Luke Howard’s day (which included James Watt, Matthew Boulton and Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus); and A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, a fictional account of the coffee-house trade in stocks in the mid-1700s.

[Juliet Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Hamblyn's The Invention of Clouds is a fascinating book that looks at the history of how clouds were classified into the types by which we know them today (eg cirrus, altostratus, cumulus), It centres on Luke Howard, the meteorologist who first came up with a properly workable and universal cloud classification (there had been other attempts, but they hadn't been successful).

The book is an excellent biography of Howard, but it is also offers excellent insights into the long history of meteorology and the broader history of science around the time (early nineteenth century).

Volcanic eruptions in 1783 caused huge disruptions to the weather across the world (I'm guessing this year's poor summer would look relatively normal in comparison!). These events had a huge impact on scientists and artists, including the young Howard.

Howard became a prominent member of the Askesian Society, a scientific grouping organised by the Quakers. At that time Quakers and other Dissenters were barred from the Universities and had to fall back on organising their own education through societies such as the Askesians. Howard was later a founding member of The Meteorological Society of London, though this was a group much riven by disagreements in its early days and it only much later became the respected Royal Meteorological Society.

The book also looks at the relationship between science and the arts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for example, attended scientific lectures to, as he said "renew my stock of metaphors" while the great German poet Goethe wrote a long poetic tribute to Luke Howard.

The book also manages to cover a brief history of the development of scientific journals and gives us fascinating nuggets of weather related information such as the Revolutionary French calendar that was used between 1793 and 1805 and renamed all the months according to their place in the agricultural year.

This is a fascinating book for anyone interested in meteorology or the history of science.

[Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This exquisite book is blowing me away. As the title implies, Hamblyn posits that our meteorological invention of weather is more like an attempt to fit physics into our human concept of language. Our ancient mythologies did this when we assigned personae to clouds, wind, sun, moon, thunder, lightning, stars, sky, planets and earth in the form of gods. Even monotheists did it, as explained by Hamblyn on page 26 when he recounts the Jews' Exodus from Egypt to Sinai and Canaan and they saw high-built convective cumulonimbus cloud forms and experienced torrential downpour for the first time. This may have been recorded as an act of God rather than the result of resettlement to a place with 15 times as much rainfall as the arid clime that the authors of the Exodus were used to. What else in the Bible was just weird weather? (And how does that relate to the weird weather we've had lately?) Hamblyn digs deep and makes many connections through the political, scientific and popular shift across the ages. The Invention of Clouds does as much to celebrate our perception of weather as language and the clouds themselves as sentient beings as does to reveal and revel in the folly of the scientific method.

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Clouds themselves, by their very nature, are self-ruining and fragmentary. They flee in haste over visible horizons to their quickly forgotten denouements. Every cloud is a small catastrophe, a world of vapor that dies before our eyes,” writes author Richard Hamblyn.

In short, clouds are ethereal things, as the Bard might say, “too flattering-sweet to be substantial.”

Indeed. “What could there be to a cloud in the sky beyond a vague metaphorical allure?” And how could anyone organize and name such fleeting, misty things?

This book is the story of amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, who in 1802 gave clouds their names. His system took the scientific community by a storm. Cirrus. Stratus. Cumulus. Nimbus. These are Howard’s words that are now part of our lexicon. And we owe it all to him. Truly fascinating book.

[Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was going to be extremely dull, but was delighted when I found that it wasn't. As a young scientist I found myself inspired by this story of a young scientist who created the convention of naming clouds, that we still use today. Science is done so much differently these days that it was a mere hundred years ago. Sure in our present era there is so much technology and knowledge that wasn't available then, but it feels like researchers mindsets have evolved as well. Who would do science for science's sake? A hundred years from now, if humanity still exists, what stories of our era of science will they tell? Just something to think about.

[Chandrashekar Gangaraju · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. It was a pleasure to read about not just about clouds and their classification but also about individuals - Lamarck, Goethe, Robert FitzRoy, Francis Beaufort and also about the Quakers, Balloon flights, the various scientific societies and the hunger for scientific journals (which I think is relatively a lot less impressive now despite the availability of knowledge at the fingertips). It was clearly more than just about Luke Howard. A bit too much poetry for me but I loved the author's storytelling.