The Invention of Clouds by Richard Hamblyn, Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
$27, ISBN 0374177155
RICHARD Hamblyn’s The Invention of Clouds is subtitled “How an amateur
meteorologist forged the language of the skies”. Its mildly sensational tone
underestimates the story. Luke Howard, son of a tinsmith in London, was
fascinated by the forms of clouds from childhood. At the end of the 18th
century, clouds were airborne mysteries although there were plenty of theories
about how they formed. In 1802, Howard, somewhat diffidently, gave a talk to an
obscure scientific society about his classification of cloud structures. He
named them for the…
