Reviews for The Invention Of Clouds

The average rating for The Invention Of Clouds based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-10-08 00:00:00 Pppppp Vvvvvvvvvv 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.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-08 00:00:00 Troy Chupp 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.