ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Everybody knows the Beaufort Scale, but it’s surprising just how much meteorology on the ground relies on scales of observation. The ‘state of ground’ patch, a small plot of earth never raked or hoed and tended free of weeds and grasses, like a grave. The tubes and fastenings of ground thermometers only thicken the plot: a Seventies premature-burial kidnapping. The patch is examined every day, like the inspection of a tiny sports pitch or course to see if play or a meet is possible, and like everything observed here it is graded according to preordained categorisations, coded on a scale that runs from ‘frozen’ or ‘drenched’ through ‘moist’ to ‘dry’. Visibility is measured by landmarks: towers or buildings at known distances are quickly clocked and recorded. It’s almost the opposite of the proverbial and pastoral folkloric forecast: ‘Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight.’ You forecast in poetry, but you collect data in prose.
But some of the measuring equipment installed in weather stations is ingenious and beautiful. The tipping-bucket rain-gauge, hidden just below ground, collects rainwater on small measuring scales that tip when full and can be linked to sensors, making it fully automatic: a device so mechanically simple and resourceful it seems to connect the world of Al-Jazari and the Arabic Middle Ages with the world of the semiconductor. The Campbell-Stokes sunshine recorder is even more elegant: a glass crystal ball, mounted facing south, that tracks the movement and power of the sun across the sky by burning a moving hole across a sheet of time-graded card. Throughout the year, three seasonal cards need to be used, depending on the angle of the sun, and weather-station recorders learn the rhythms of these cards, looking forward to when the winter card will be replaced by the equinoctial card as much as the rest of us might welcome the clocks going forward. On sunny days there is a fresh, scorched smell hanging in the air like incense when the sunshine recorder is approached.
And then there is the Stevenson Screen. A white (to reflect solar radiation) wooden box, its door faces north and its walls are double louvred (to permit a stable airflow). It was designed by Thomas Stevenson to create a stable environment in which to site temperature and barometric pressure-measuring equipment, though Stevenson was better known in his day as a lighthouse designer, as were his brothers and his father Robert Stevenson, who was also a builder of roads; but one of his sons, Robert Louis Stevenson, broke with this dynastic, paternal vocation of scientific engineering and lighthouse-building. It caused a great deal of bitterness within the family.
And yet. The Stevenson who wrote The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Treasure Island was originally trained as an engineer. His earliest published work was a paper — ‘On the Thermal Influence of Forests’ — presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1873. The engineering achievements of his father and uncles and grandfather underwrote the writing life Stevenson undertook, and there’s plenty of evidence to suggest he was keenly aware of this, and of the discrepancy between those towering achievements and his own smaller literary accomplishments. Not that the world saw it that way: in 1886 Stevenson wrote an angry letter to Scribner’s complaining at the lack of public recognition his father had received, comparing his own fame and success:
. . . I might write books till 1900 and not serve humanity so well; and it moves me to a certain impatience, to see the little, frothy bubble that attends the author his son, and compare it with the obscurity in which that better man finds his reward.
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