The Invention of Clouds
A love story for today and tomorrow.
During the late eighteenth century, in a musky old boarding school classroom, a ten-year-old boy stares wistfully out of the window. As the schoolmaster rambles on about Latin conjugations, the boy allows his mind to wander up into the lofty realm above. The drone of the lesson fades away and now he’s riding a great white whale, crashing through airy waves that undulate around him, engulfing him entirely within the atmospheric mist. The classroom is soon forgotten. Little did this young boy know that this flight of imagination was more than just a daydream; it was his destiny. And in just a few decades’ time, he would become the Namer of Clouds.
Translating the skies
The chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772-1864) came from humble means, but his legacy is great. In December 1802 Howard presented a lecture to the Askesian Society titled simply, ‘Essay on Clouds’, which was later published as the essay ‘On the Modification of Clouds’. In this work, he attempts what others before him had failed at or thought too difficult: to pin down the transient heavens and forge a language of the skies. The result was his groundbreaking taxonomy for clouds, which we still use today: cumulus, cirrus, stratus. And yes, it’s thanks to Howard that Harry Potter had his Nimbus 2000.
However, Howard’s theory of cloud formation didn’t just catch the imagination of J.K. Rowling. Contemporary Romantic poets and artists were also stirred by the meteorologist's work. His influence is easily seen in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1820 poem ‘The Cloud’ as well as John Constable’s famous cloud paintings. In 1815, German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was so inspired by Howard’s essay that he wrote the poem ‘In Honour of Howard’. He was grateful for Howard’s work and soon became hungry to know more about the unassuming meteorologist, writing to the British Foreign Office and requesting ‘even the barest outline of Howard’s life’.
At first, I thought this a bit strange. I wouldn’t immediately associate Romantic writers - who revere the imaginative faculty - as representative of the quantifying spirit of the Enlightenment; Howard’s essay seems to be the perfect example of the eighteenth-century impulse to define and classify the natural world. However, a closer look at Howard’s work reveals that his specialist language does not restrict but rather expands the vagueness and inextricable sense of mood and feeling that enriches our perception of the skies.
The unprecedented essay describes the sky as the face of the earth and, just as our face reveals our emotions, the clouds are presented as ‘visible indicators’ of the atmosphere above. This association between the sky and feeling continues throughout his work; his clouds are almost personified in their individuality and the moods that they evoke.1 So much so that the scientific text is almost rendered poetic.
‘The effect of the new taxonomy was paradoxically not to fix the scientific object but just the opposite, to make visible, and more important, writable’
— Professor Marjorie Levinson
Conversations with clouds
The influence of the weather on our mood is undeniable, but it’s the clouds, I believe, that encourage and excite our imagination. A clear blue sky might make you smile for a moment but a shapeshifting cumulus or approaching cumulonimbus has the power to inspire and thrill. But the magic really happens when you realise the intimacy between yourself and the sky.
Although clouds themselves are universal, they are unique to the observer’s perspective and are, in this way, multitudinous. They offer infinite variations not only in their own shapeshifting but in that which we, the human viewers, create in our mind’s eye. It’s human nature to interact emotively with the world around us and I think that Howard’s taxonomy provides a language through which we can converse about - and even with - the ethereal forms of our atmosphere.
The legacy of Howard is often reimagined as a bit of a love story. In Stéphane Audeguy’s novel, The Theory of Clouds, Howard’s aim is that ‘clouds ought to be understood’ and ‘be appreciated for themselves; that they be, in a word, loved.’ While Carol Ann Duffy’s poem, ‘Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds’, portrays him as a ‘smitten’ boy who ‘loved clouds most’. These are just a few of many romantic recreations of Howard, which transform this ‘man of domestic’ habits into a Romantic visionary.
Head in the clouds
Luke Howard provided a language with which we could define the previously unknowable skies. But he also gave clouds a voice by turning them into something graspable, something with which humans could finally, to some extent, have a conversation. It’s telling that despite his influence on meteorological science, it's the Romantic image of a curious boy staring out the window that persists.
We’ve all been that little boy staring at the sky. For many of us, clouds are more than just omens of a rainy afternoon, they’re endless possibilities; mood-changers; sources of inspiration. They’re the potential of the human mind made real. Or at least, that’s how I see them.
Read
Anderson, Katherine. Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Audeguy, Stéphane.The Theory of Clouds, trans. Timony Bent, Harcourt Trade, 2007.
Badt, Karl. John Constable’s Clouds, trans. Stanley Godman, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1950.
Duffy, Carol Ann.The Bees. Picador, 2011.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. ‘In honour of Mr. Howard’ or ‘Howard’s Ehrengedӓchtnis’
— Scientific Studies. Ed. and trans. Douglas Miller. Vol. 12 of Collected Works. Princeton University Press, 1996.
Greenlaw, Lavinia. A World Where News Travelled Slowly. Faber and Faber, 1997.
Hamblyn, Richard. The Invention of Clouds, Picador, 2001.
— Clouds: Nature and Culture, Reaktion Books, 2017.
Howard, Luke. On the Modification of Clouds (1803)
Jardine, Boris. ‘Made real: artifice and accuracy in nineteenth-century scientific illustration’, Autumn 2014, Issue 02, Science Museum Group Journal.
Levinson, Marjorie. ‘Of Being Numerous’, Studies in Romanticism, vol. 49, no. 4, 2010, pp. 633–657, JSTOR.
Scott, Douglas. Luke Howard (1772-1864): His Correspondence with Goethe and His Continental Journey of 1816. William Sessions Ltd, 1976.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. ‘The Cloud’, 1820.
Thornes, John E., ‘Luke Howard’s Influence on Art and Literature in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Weather, vol. 39, no. 8 (1984), pp. 252–255.
Look
Listen
Kitty Macfarlane. Namer of Clouds, Navigator Records, 2018.
Howard reveals in his footnotes the affective power of clouds. They are “pleasing” to him and fill him with a feeling of “warmth and calmness”. The Cirro-cumulus creates a “very beautiful sky” but the Cirro-stratus offers a “frowning sky”.