Le savant et la tempête: Étudier l'atmosphère et prévoir le temps au XIXe siècle (review)

The atmosphere figures in Aristotelian physics and cosmology, as does its weight in seventeenth-century experimental physics and its composition in late-eighteenth-century chemistry. But the science of meteorology properly speaking and its application in weather prediction assumed modern form only in the half-century beginning in the 1830s. Manifold factors largely external to the scientific community called for this change and made it possible. Rapid development of means of transportation by rail, clipper ships, and steamships facilitated speedy delivery of exponentially increasing volumes of manufactured products and raw materials. Shipping was specially dependent on knowledge of the weather. The telegraph, eventually worldwide, permitted immediate communication of meteorological and other data. Exploration of the Arctic, Antarctic, and other little-known areas yielded previously unavailable climatological information.

Organization of international collaboration in recording simultaneous observations worldwide began in the 1830s with Carl Gauss and Wilhelm Weber's program for studying Earth's magnetic field. It continued with the collaboration of John Herschel and Belgian astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet in achieving a worldwide, continuous, and statistically based survey of meteorological data. Throughout the Restoration and the July Monarchy, the French Academy of Sciences took little or no interest in meteorological problems. François Arago, who then dominated the public face of science, considered that weather prediction was too complicated and uncertain ever to become an object of scientific inquiry. But matters changed during the Second Empire when Urbain Le Verrier became director of the Observatory of Paris, which he ruled with an iron hand. With respect to meteorology, his object was to bring all aspects of atmospheric observation and science under the purview and control of the observatory. It became in effect the national weather bureau, issuing daily bulletins consisting of weather maps, current data, and predictions, all for the information of the public and the guidance of mariners and others dependent on the weather.

The title of Fabien Locher's excellent monograph is slightly misleading. It is no simple account of scientists and the weather. The factors involved in the development of meteorology could scarcely have been more heterogeneous. Unlike other scientists, meteorologists submitted their findings not just to each other but directly and daily to the public. People of very different educational and social backgrounds were also involved: shipowners and captains, cartographers, volunteers, amateurs, journalists, graduates of the École polytechnique, other engineers, industrialists, telegraphers, explorers, balloonists, and the like. Nor did they often see eye-to-eye. Sailors putting out to sea resented the meddling of hydrographers, all safe and inexperienced in Paris. Le Verrier denounced as a charlatan one Matthieu de la Drôme, publisher of popular almanacs on the weather and other topics.

The tension between amateurs and scientists was often acute, and never completely resolved. In the late eighteenth century meteorology had become a hobby among the well-educated class throughout France. Doctors, landed proprietors, and government officials made it a pastime to record daily observations of barometric pressure, temperature, winds, and precipitation, sending in accounts to the Royal Societies of Medicine and of Agriculture, both unofficial organizations. That practice died out during the Revolution and under the Restoration, only to revive under more sophisticated forms during the Second Empire. To the delight of all Paris and the irritation of Le Verrier, the journalist Camille Flammarion put in hand a series of spectacular balloon ascensions during which he took readings of the barometer and thermometer, observed wind conditions, cloud appearances, and humidity at various altitudes, and recorded his reactions to the exposure, all published in the popular press and characterized as scientific. Besides such intrusion into scientific territory, Le Verrier and his colleagues deplored the injection of subjective elements into what should be a body of objective knowledge. In their eyes the ideal observer would be a machine.

In keeping with much French historiography...