Shattered Tubes and Spilled Mercury: Meteorological Instruments and Their Challenges, ca. 1790-1850

Historians of the atmospheric sciences are often quick to specify the threshold of meteorology’s modernity as the invention of meteorological instruments (most famously the barometer and thermometer) in the early 17th century. Such a narrative conceals, however, the failure of instrumental weather observations through the following two centuries at least to produce quantifiable natural laws of the weather. And although a more diversified history, of the barometer as “weather glass” and salon furniture has emerged (e.g. Golinski, 2007), the manifold problems which instruments created for the numerous “lay” weather observers remains in the dark. Based on the presentation of archival material from German archival sources of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this talk aims to survey more generally things that could go wrong when acquiring, transporting, using, repairing, and reading an instrument. Recording precise and reliable data was a challenge in meteorology at the time because it was, for the most part, not a laboratory science. Rather, the whole point of the observations was to expose the instruments to the elements in stationary (often household) settings or during travel, leaving these fragile objects particularly vulnerable. In addition, I will present the strategies developed over the course of the 19th century to meet such problems. Standardized meteorological data thus emerges as something which had to be actively created, despite continuous “states of disrepair” (Schaffer, 2011), through a cumbersome and labour-intensive dialogue between humans and instruments.