Predicting the Weather

Victorians and the Science of Meteorology

Cloth $52.50 ISBN: 9780226019680 Published May 2005

E-book $7.00 to $42.00 About E-books ISBN: 9780226019703 Published November 2010

Victorian Britain, with its maritime economy and strong links between government and scientific enterprises, founded an office to collect meteorological statistics in 1854 in an effort to foster a modern science of the weather. But as the office turned to prediction rather than data collection, the fragile science became a public spectacle, with its forecasts open to daily scrutiny in the newspapers. And meteorology came to assume a pivotal role in debates about the responsibility of scientists and the authority of science.

Studying meteorology as a means to examine the historical identity of prediction, Katharine Anderson offers here an engrossing account of forecasting that analyzes scientific practice and ideas about evidence, the organization of science in public life, and the articulation of scientific values in Victorian culture. In Predicting the Weather, Anderson grapples with fundamental questions about the function, intelligibility, and boundaries of scientific work while exposing the public expectations that shaped the practice of science during this period.

A cogent analysis of the remarkable history of weather forecasting in Victorian Britain, Predicting the Weather will be essential reading for scholars interested in the public dimensions of science.

Review Quotes
Contents

"Predicting the Weather is a witty and erudite classic in the social history of meteorology. Katherine Anderson cogently illustrates how early British weather forecasting was a controversial business molded both by resilient public expectations of scientific authority and by practitioners' concern with maintaining a boundary between scientific prediction and disreputable futurology. In showing the fascinating ways in which Victorian meteorological science thus intersected not only with almanac publishing, astronomy, empire, and navigation, but also with politics, probability, psychology, and religion, this book is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of public knowledge and culture in the nineteenth century."—Graeme Gooday, coeditor of Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939

"Katharine Anderson has identified an important and understudied topic in the history of Victorian science—the emergence of weather study as a heavily institutionalized science. She tells the complicated story with great adroitness—embedding nineteenth-century meteorology firmly in the politics of elite science, without neglecting its alternative context of weather wisemen and other popular prognosticators. Deeply researched and evocatively illustrated, Predicting the Weather is an impressive achievement—a significant contribution to the study of Victorian science and of the relation of science and scientists to the larger culture to which they belonged."—Harriet Ritvo, author of The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination

"We are so accustomed to weather forecasts today that we take them for granted, but Katharine Anderson shows how Victorian scientists struggled to produce them and get them accepted. She demonstrates that knowledge of the atmosphere reflects beliefs about what science should be like and what institutions should study it. Her book is an excellent contribution to the cultural history of the British weather."—Jan Golinski, author of Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science

"Relying on grand statistical compilations and weather maps, Victorian meteorologists hoped to redeem prediction from astrologers and to demonstrate that the weather was determined by physical law and not by prayer. In a series of beautifully drawn episodes, Katharine Anderson reveals the vulnerability of scientific expertise to the vagaries of complex atmospheric systems, the jeering of critics, and rival anticipations by untrained local people on the basis of 'weather wisdom.'"—Theodore M. Porter, author of Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age

"Rich in scholarship and perceptive in insight, Predicting the Weather is a landmark study of one of the most adventurous enterprises in Victorian science. Covering a stunning range of hitherto unexplored issues, from almanacs to analysis and from clouds to calculating clerks, Anderson provides an extraordinarily vivid account of the personal, political, and professional forces that shaped the modern culture of weather forecasting."—Vladimir Jankovic, author of Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820

"Where else but at London's Great Exhibition in 1851 would it be possible to find an instrument which used the instinctive reactions of a dozen leeches to anticipate approaching storms? We take weather forecasts for granted today, but their Victorian origins are full of surprise and controversy. Katharine Anderson's ambitious, imaginative, and often witty book reveals how the modern predictive science of meteorology emerged from a fizzy cocktail of astrology, religious enthusiasm, technological ingenuity, and imperial enterprise. Ranging from foggy Scottish mountaintops to monsoon-swept India, the compelling story she tells opens up new chapters in our understanding of nineteenth-century culture."—James A. Secord, author of Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation

"Engaging and enlightening. . . . Anderson's portrait of Victorian meteorology is delicately and deftly drawn, enlivened by well-chosen examples and illustrations. As one might expect of a study of the British and their weather, it penetrates into the oddest crannies of the culture, from insurance companies to Hardy's novels."—Lorrain Daston, London Review of Books

"This is an excellent book, written in an accessible fashion with many interesting stories surrounding the trials and tribulations of pioneering scientists. These stories are also richly sourced, providing factual and historical significance. . . . Weather enthusiasts at all levels will benefit from reading this book.—Mace Bentley, Weatherwise

"By showing how much culture went into the making of Victorian meteorology, Anderson has made a major contribution to our understanding of how the Victorians themselves understood the cultural place of their science."

"Anderson provides a fuller portrait of the period when meteorology became institutionalzed than has previously been available. . . . An engaging and convincing portrait of the lively Victorian debates over the weather."

"Anderson has written an innovative and impressively wide-ranging cultural history of studies of the British weather."

"This is an original, ambitious, and well-researched study that fills up a significant lacuna in the historiography of meteorology."

"There is no doubt that Anderson's book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Victorian meteorology. More than this, by exploring together sometimes esoteric and other times popular Victorian debates about the weather, Anderson has generously supplemented our appreciation of Victorian science-in-culture.—Diarmid Finnegan, H-Net Review

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: A Science of the Weather
1. Prediction, Prophecy, and Scientific Culture
2. Weather Prophets and the Victorian Almanac
3. Weather in a Public Office
4. Precision and a Science of Probabilities
5. Maps, Instruments, and Weather Wisdom
6. Science, State, and Empire
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

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