As I got into a Brighton taxi this morning, my driver’s first words were ‘apparently it’ll clear in a couple of hours’. I gathered — of course — that he was talking about the morning mist. ‘It’s almost gone already up in town.’ A conversation about weather prospects is hardly uncommon in British taxis, and we launched into this one with no preamble at all (he hadn’t said hello), as though invisibly picking up the thread of a conversation already in progress, a perpetual, life-long discussion about whether it’ll rain tomorrow filling in as the default whenever nothing else is being said.
It’s odd. And in The Weather Experiment, Peter Moore tells us how we got here. His subject is the 19th-century development of meteorology, a complicated fits-and-starts evolution rather than a hurtling meteoric rise (shame: that might have made a passable joke for a reviewer), taking in scientific and technological advances but also character, circumstance and controversy, intrigue and coincidence.
Well into the 18th century, navigators and ‘scientists’ (a word of somewhat different meaning then) were learning their meteorology from Aristotle.
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