Did You Know?
A Quaker named the clouds
Cumulus. Stratus. Cirrus. Nimbus. These Latin
names for types of clouds don’t date from classic
Rome but from 1802 in England, when Luke
Howard became the first person to propose an
analysis of clouds that was accepted by the scientific
establishment.Howard himself was a successful businessman and an amateur scientist, prevented from studying at university because of the prejudice against Quakers. Until Howard’s paper, many scientists thought that clouds changed too quickly and too much to be studied scientifically. Howard’s research not only gave scientists tools to study metereological science, but captured the popular and cultural imagination as well.
As Wolfgang von Goethe said, Howard “was the first to hold fast conceptually the airy and always changing form of clouds, to limit and fasten down the indefinite, the intangible and unattainable and give them appropriate names.”
Goethe dedicated four poems to Howard and artists such as J.W.M. Turner and John Constable used Howard’s descriptions of cloud formations for their paintings.
— Terry Matz