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.

In 1877 the Scottish Meteorological Society proposed the establishment of a meteorological station on Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, but attempts at raising funds came to nothing. Having read of the efforts to establish an observatory, the English meteorologist, Clement Wragge, offered to take observations on the mountain. He took his first readings on 31 May 1881 and continued to do so until the autumn, resuming his observations through the summer of 1882. Wragge made a daily trek from his home base at Fort William up to the summit, starting at 5am and finishing at 3pm. Enroute he took observations at a number of stations using instruments either placed along the route or carried. Wragge kept a ‘Rough Observation Book’ in which he recorded each of his journeys. His labours were crucial in supporting the successful movement to establish a permanent observatory on Ben Nevis in 1883; Sir William Thomson noting in a public meeting in Glasgow that ‘the observations conducted by Mr Wragge with great skill, endurance, and enthusiasm … seemed to him … a stronger testimony than any other consideration that could be offered as to the importance of such a work.’ This paper considers the socio-materialities of Wragge’s field-campaign, particularly his field notebooks and travelling instruments, and roles they played in both supporting his argument for a permanent Scottish mountain observatory and constructing his heroic and self-denying scientific personae. The paper also interrogates wider attitudes to field meteorology in an era of observatory science.

Positioned on key maritime trading routes, ravaged frequently by cyclones, and visited periodically by devastating droughts, weather and climate were key concerns of colonial Mauritius. Focusing on the period 1850 to 1920, this paper examines how tropical cyclones were reckoned with by colonial administrators and scientists. It contends that making sense of and predicting the behaviour of such storms was always more than an epistemic problem. It was also a challenge of piecing together a socio-material assemblage of observation, constituted by passing ships, with their log books and weather-watchers, by reliable instruments and trustworthy, healthy and static observers onshore, and by means of circulating the assembled knowledge such that its lesson could be absorbed by both local mariners and distant savants. Drawing on recent work revisiting the place of materiality in histories of scientific knowledge-making, this paper foregrounds the material politics of meteorology in what might otherwise be a rather triumphalist narrative of scientific progress. It examines first the role of data visualisation and printing practices in both aiding and retarding the development of cyclonic theory. Secondly, the paper shows how, as new theories of cyclone behaviour offered the possibility of anticipation, the tropical climate itself began to intervene in the apparatus of prediction, felling and jamming telegraph lines, and rendering sites of weather observation uninhabitable. The paper argues for the inseparability of the material and the epistemic in Mauritian meteorology, and questions what that means for our handling of the ‘local’ in history of science.

Drawing from literatures that reframe meteorology through the lenses of infrastructure and socio-material “assemblages,” this paper considers how the material dimensions of weather science in India were distinctive. Through the production of quantitative data, leaders of the India Meteorological Department (f. 1875) sought to render the atmosphere above South Asia not only bureaucratically manageable, but also comparable to Europe’s, a project entailing the extension of communication and mapping technologies and the recruitment of “native” observers as (often reluctant) human instruments. However, architects of this data-generating apparatus repeatedly expressed concern that the tropical environment and its inhabitants made faithful transplantation of European systems impractical, even if the imperial exchequer devoted adequate resources (it didn't). The core of the paper examines how meteorologists navigated perceived material challenges. First, it considers instructional observer handbooks alongside the coercive figure of the traveling “inspector,” whose peculiar responsibility it was to discipline troublesome observers and calibrate their finicky, fragile instruments. Next, it discusses the gradual replacement of expensive, often climatically-unsuitable European instruments with domestic alternatives or new inventions altogether, suggesting that the trend toward substitution accelerated because of the requirements of upper-air balloon researchers in Agra. Finally, it investigates the short-lived project to gather and statistically assess vernacular weather proverbs, an enterprise grounded in a 1950s nationalist critique of “foreign” methods for studying India’s weather. These cases help us to understand how the instabilities of modern weather-data networks reciprocally influenced broader theories of tropical difference advanced by imperialists and nationalists alike, if for quite different reasons.

The early 20th-century American geographer Ellsworth Huntington is well-known for his work on climatic determinism, eugenics and in writing popular geographical textbooks (Fleming, 1998). Huntington’s work sought causal explanation for the patterns of civilization and mortality across the globe, in particular focusing on climatic, cultural and hereditary factors. His compilations of vast swathes of data were often crude and led to generalised claims that were subsequently widely critiqued. In research on climate and mortality in New York City, however, Huntington worked with prominent experts in American life assurance and with their latest technologies (namely punch cards, sorting machines and tabulators), to analyse late 19th century data and propose causation between particular climatic conditions and death rates. Indeed, this work was pioneering in its use of such equipment at that time and in the working relationship developed between insurers and climatologists. These technologies, however, also shaped this work in at least three ways: through the limiting cost of the equipment and labour, the style and structure of the standard Hollerith punch card, and the typical practices of clerks in the life assurance companies. Drawing on archival fieldwork at Yale University with the extensive early 1920s correspondence between Huntington and notables like Arthur Hunter (actuary, New York Life) and Louis Dublin (statistician, Metropolitan Life), the paper contributes to discussions of materiality in the history of the atmospheric sciences. Through narrating this example, the paper re-asserts the importance of understanding how climatological research is produced through the socio-materialities of technological and institutional systems.