Riding a city bus on the freeway a while back, I noticed a particularly interesting/enticing cloud formation, and thought that it might be a good idea to read a book about clouds (natural enough given how much of my time I've spent - and continue to spend - looking at clouds). So, the next time I was at the Pines library, I borrowed the only book which came up when I searched for 'clouds' on the catalogue - this one. Turned out to be a good read, too - and, in its focus on history rather than science, an accessible one.
The 'invention of clouds' referred to in the title is the classificatory system proposed by Luke Howard, a young London Quaker, in the early nineteenth century; the basic terminology introduced by Howard of 'Cirrus', 'Stratus, 'Cumulus', 'Nimbus', and their compound forms has endured down to our time. Hamblyn dwells on the significance of Howard's insistence that cloud types could indeed be identified and classified into broad families (rather than each being individual phenomena) and his insight that clouds were formed through modification and aggregation, accounting for the seemingly endless variety that we perceive. The book is oriented around Howard's life and ideas, but also fluently covers the major channels in previous and subsequent thought on clouds and the social and scientific context in which Howard's work came to fruition (it's fascinating to read the accounts of the popular public scientific lectures and the vogue for scientific societies of the time). Hambly paints with a broad, contextualising sweep - the French revolution looms in the background, Linnaeus and Lamarck play an important role, Goethe makes a personal appearance, figures like Keats, Darwin and John Constable are present at the margins of the narrative, and balloonists, explorers, amateur enthusiasts, publishers and out-and-out meteorologists all assume central stage at various points - and it all holds together rather pleasingly.
