The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future - Rilegato

Moore, Peter

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0865478090 ISBN 13: 9780865478091

Casa editrice: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2015

Riassunto

In 1865 Admiral Robert FitzRoy locked himself in his dressing room and cut his throat. His grand meteorological project had failed. Yet only a decade later, FitzRoy's storm warning system and "forecasts" would return, the model for what we use today.

In an age when a storm at sea was evidence of God's wrath, nineteenth-century meteorologists had to fight against convention and religious dogma. Buoyed by the achievements of the Enlightenment, a generation of mavericks set out to decipher the secrets of the atmosphere and predict the future. Among them were Luke Howard, the first to classify clouds; Francis Beaufort, who quantified the winds; James Glaisher, who explored the upper atmosphere in a hot-air balloon; Samuel Morse, whose electric telegraph gave scientists the means by which to transmit weather warnings; and FitzRoy himself, master sailor, scientific pioneer, and founder of the U.K.'s national weather service.

Reputations were built and shattered. Fractious debates raged over decades between scientists from London and Galway, Paris and New York. Explaining the atmosphere was one thing, but predicting what it was going to do seemed a step too far. In 1854, when a politician suggested to the Commons that Londoners might soon know the weather twenty-four hours in advance, the House roared with laughter.

Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment navigates treacherous seas and rough winds to uncover the obsession that drove these men to great invention and greater understanding.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Peter Moore was born in Staffordshire, England in 1983. He is the author of Damn His Blood: Being a True and Detailed History of the Most Barbarous and Inhumane Murder at Oddingley and the Quick and Awful Retribution. He is a visiting lecturer at City University London, where he teaches nonfiction writing, and was recently the writer in residence at Gladstone's Library in Hawarden, Wales.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0865478090
• ISBN 13: 9780865478091
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 395