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Published Jun 2015
416 pages
Genre: Science, Health and the Environment
Publication Information
A history of weather forecasting, and an animated portrait of the nineteenth-century pioneers who made it possible
By the 1800s, a century of feverish discovery had launched the major branches of science. Physics, chemistry, biology, geology, and astronomy made the natural world explicable through experiment, observation, and categorization. And yet one scientific field remained in its infancy. Despite millennia of observation, mankind still had no understanding of the forces behind the weather. A century after the death of Newton, the laws that governed the heavens were entirely unknown, and weather forecasting was the stuff of folklore and superstition.
Peter Moore's The Weather Experiment is the account of a group of naturalists, engineers, and artists who conquered the elements. It describes their travels and experiments, their breakthroughs and bankruptcies, with picaresque vigor. It takes readers from Irish bogs to a thunderstorm in Guanabara Bay to the basket of a hydrogen balloon 8,500 feet over Paris. And it captures the particular bent of mind - combining the Romantic love of Nature and the Enlightenment love of Reason - that allowed humanity to finally decipher the skies.
"Detailed and insightful, this book is as relevant as ever in this era of rapid climate change." - Kirkus
"This is a worthy investigation of the history of weather forecasting as seen through a British lens." - Publishers Weekly
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Peter Moore grew up in Staffordshire in the 1980/90s, then travelled north to study as an undergraduate at Collingwood College in Durham. After university he spent three years in Madrid before he returned to start an MA in non-fiction writing at City, University of London in 2008.
Moore teaches creative writing at the University of London and the University of Oxford. He is the author of Damn His Blood and The Weather Experiment, which was named one of the New York Times Book Review's 100 Notable Books of 2015 and adapted for a BBC4 documentary series. He lives in London.
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