Waters of the World

by Sarah Dry

  Work, for these individuals, was a quest, at once playful and completely serious, that took place across decades and landscapes both mental and physical. Following water, and the heat it held (or held traces of), they drew trajectories through time and space just as the molecules they studied did. Their playful exploring was, in its seeking, searching quality, elevated by a poignant sense of longing—for more knowledge, more time with which to study the planet, more freedom in their work, and more tools with which to see deeply. Play, for these individuals, was an avenue for something serious, something big. They each, in their own way, sought something deeply meaningful from their engagement with the planet. So should we all.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I could not have written this book without the expertise and generosity of many people. Speaking with scientists who study water in the oceans, water vapor in the atmosphere, and ice in glaciers and ice sheets has been one of the principal pleasures of writing it. I am happy for the opportunity to thank these generous people here. David Marshall enthusiastically shared his knowledge and loaned me several all-important but hard-to-find volumes from Stommel’s Collected Works. Carl Wunsch read and commented on several chapters, sharing his historical sensitivity and mastery of the field. During a 2017 visit to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Rui Xin Huang shared his memories of Henry Stommel and made sure I understood something of the special culture of the place, including the GFD seminar. At Woods Hole, Joe Pedlosky and John Marshall also spent time talking with me about both the history and current state of physical oceanography. Back in the UK, Giles Harrison welcomed me to Reading, shared his work on atmospheric physics, and inducted me into the joyful practice of balloon launchings.

  I am grateful to the following people for reading and commenting on draft chapters: George Adamson, Matthias Heymann, Mike Hulme, Peggy LeMone, David Marshall, Richard Staley, Spencer Weart, Ed Zipser, and the participants of the following seminars: “Towards a History of Paleoclimatology: Changing Roles and Shifting Scales in Climate Sciences,” a workshop held at the Centre for Environmental Humanities at the University of Hamburg, September 6–7, 2017; “Estimated Truths: Water, Science and Politics of Approximation,” held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, August 16–17, 2017; and a summer school on “History of Physics: Scientific Instruments and Environmental Physics” convened by the St. Cross Centre for the History and Philosophy of Physics Centre at Brasenose College, Oxford, August 20–24, 2018. I also benefited from conversations and emails with Karen Aplin, Wallace Broecker, Harry Bryden, Ian Hewitt, Jim Ledwell, Martin Mahony, Dennis Moore, Walter Munk, Chris Rapley, Emily Shuckburgh, John Tennyson, Chris Wilson, and two anonymous reviewers for the University of Chicago Press. All remaining errors are mine alone. In addition, I want to thank Dave Sherman at the Data Library and Archives of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Diana Carey at the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute; Karen Moran at the Library of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh; and the staff at the Institute Archives and Special Collections, MIT, the Royal Society in London, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

  I am grateful to have Peter Tallack of the Science Factory as my agent, and have benefited from two superb editors: Karen Merikangas Darling, at the University of Chicago Press, and Philip Gwyn Jones, at Scribe UK. This book is much the better for their thoughtful and enthusiastic engagement. It is also better thanks to the support of a 2015–2016 Public Scholar grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  Friends who have helped keep me afloat include Hayley MacGregor, Sylvie Zannier-Betts, Signe Gosmann, Liz Woolley, Laura Stark, Patrick Tripp, and Susie Reiss. Thanks to all. Now we can finally talk about something else.

  My parents, Paul and Cecie Dry, and my sister, Katie Dry, have always supported me, and this book is no exception. I am grateful for their unconditional love and patience with a project that overflowed all of the deadlines I set for it.

  At home, I am lucky to have two special people: Jacob, who buoys me like no other, and Rob, who always believes in me.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1 Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia; Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson, James Elwick, Bernard Lightman, and Michael S. Reidy, eds., The Correspondence of John Tyndall (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014–); and Roland Jackson, The Ascent of John Tyndall: Victorian Scientist, Mountaineer, and Public Intellectual (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

  2 Stephen Schneider, “Editorial for the First Issue of Climatic Change,” Climatic Change 1, no. 1 (1977): 3–4.

  3 John Tyndall, The Forms of Water in Clouds and Rivers, Ice and Glaciers (London: King, 1872), 6.

  4 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 7–9.

  5 See, for example, Sheila Jasanoff, “Image and Imagination: The Formation of Global Environmental Consciousness,” in P. Edwards and C. Miller, eds., Changing the Atmosphere: Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 309–337. For a longer history of global images, see Dennis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and Sebastian Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut: l’invention de l’environnement global (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2014).

  CHAPTER 2

  1 See John Tyndall, “Winter Expedition to the Mer de Glace, 1859,” in The Glaciers of the Alps: being a narrative of excursions and ascents, an account of the origin and phenomena of glaciers and an exposition of the physical principles to which they are related (London: John Murray, 1860), 195–218. For this expedition, Tyndall employed Eduard Simond and Joseph Tairraz as guides, and four additional porters (199). See also the typescript journals of John Tyndall, vol. 3, section 8, 24–30 December 1859, 101–175, held by the Royal Institution; and Jackson, Tyndall, chapter 8, “Storms over Glaciers, 1858–1860,” 149–150.

  2 Tyndall, Journals, vol. 3, 101.

  3 Tyndall, Glaciers, 208.

  4 Tyndall, Journals, vol. 3, 159.

  5 For more on the dispute between Tyndall and Forbes, see J. S. Rowlinson, “The Theory of Glaciers,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 26 (1971): 189–204; Bruce Hevly, “The Heroic Science of Glacier Motion,” Osiris 11 (1996): 66–86: and Jackson, Tyndall, chapter 8, “Storms over Glaciers, 1858–1860,” 132–151.

  6 John Tyndall, “On the Physical Phenomena of Glaciers,” Philosophical Transactions 149 (1859): 261–278.

  7 Martin Rudwick, Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Martin Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  8 Cited in Christopher Hamlin, “James Geikie, James Croll, and the Eventful Ice Age,” Annals of Science 39 (1982): 569.

  9 Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise, Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 556.

  10 Rudwick, Earth’s Deep History, 150.

  11 William Hopkins, “On the Causes which may have produced changes in the Earth’s superficial temperature,” Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society 8 (1 February 1852): 88.

  12 In 1851, Hopkins read a paper to the Geological Society, in which he quoted Poisson’s estimate that only about one-twentieth of a degree of the mean temperature of the earth was due to the so-called “primitive heat.” Not only was this percentage small, it was diminishing at such a slow rate that it would take “a hundred thousand millions of years” to reduce this fraction by half. Even for those geologists accustomed to requiring vast amounts of time for the changes of the earth, this was a long time. See Crosbie Smith, “William Hopkins and the Shaping of Dynamical Geology: 1830–1860,” British Journal for the History of Science 22, no. 1 (March 1989): 41.

&nb
sp; 13 Hopkins, “On the Causes,” 59. Hopkins noted that while previously geologists could only imagine “changes of climatal conditions” from a “higher to a lower general temperature on the earth’s surface,” more “accurate geological research” had shown that “these changes have been to a considerable extent of an oscillatory character,” and “so far as they may be thus characterized, they cannot of course be accounted for by the earth’s internal heat.”

  14 From James Campbell Irons, Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work (London: Edward Stanford, 1896), 32. For more on Croll, see James Fleming, “James Croll in Context: The Encounter between Climate Dynamics and Geology in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” History of Meteorology 3 (2006): 43–54.

  15 Irons, Croll, 35.

  16 Irons, Croll, 228.

  17 Cited in Fleming, “Croll,” 49.

  18 Hamlin, “Geikie,” 580.

  19 Herschel to Lyell, 6 February 1965; Herschel to Lyell, 15 February 1865, both in Herschel Papers.

  20 Charles Darwin to James Croll, 19 September 1868, cited in Irons, Croll, 200.

  21 James Geikie, The Great Ice Age and Its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (London: W. Isbister, 1874), 94.

  22 Hamlin, “Geikie,” 578.

  23 Geikie, Great Ice Age, 95.

  24 Irons, Croll, 104.

  25 John Tyndall to James Croll, 14 January 1865, cited in Irons, Croll, 104.

  26 Tyndall, Forms, 7.

  27 Tyndall, Forms, 14.

  28 “Glacial Theories,” North American Review 96, no. 198 (January 1863): 2.

  29 See Crosbie Smith, “William Thomson and the Creation of Thermodynamics: 1840–1855,” Archive for the Exact Sciences 16 (1977): 231–288.

  30 William Hopkins, “On the Theory of the Motion of Glaciers,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 152 (1862): 677.

  31 See Naomi Oreskes and Ronald Doel, “The Physics and Chemistry of the Earth,” in Mary Jo Nye, ed., The Cambridge History of Science (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2003), 544.

  32 Hevly, “Heroic Science”; and Michael Reidy, “Mountaineering, Masculinity, and the Male Body in Victorian Britain,” in Robert Nye and Erika Milam, eds., “Scientific Masculinities,” Osiris 30 (November 2015): 158–181.

  33 Tyndall, Glaciers.

  34 Tyndall, Glaciers, v.

  35 Tyndall, Glaciers, 116.

  36 Cited in Daniel Brown, The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 110.

  37 Cited in Brown, Poetry, 117.

  38 Cited in Rowlinson, “Theory,” 194.

  39 Tyndall, “The Bakerian Lecture: On the Absorption and Radiation of Heat by Gases and Vapours, and on the Physical Connexion of Radiation, Absorption and Conduction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 151 (1861): 1.

  40 The device and the challenges it posed are described in Tyndall, “Bakerian Lecture.”

  41 Diary of John Tyndall, summer 1861, Royal Institution.

  42 Diary of John Tyndall, 18 May 1859, Royal Institution.

  43 At first, Tyndall hadn’t even bothered to test water vapor and carbon dioxide; since they existed in such small quantities in the atmosphere, he assumed that “their effect upon radiant heat must be quite inappreciable.” A. J. Meadows, “Tyndall as a Physicist,” in W. H. Brock, N. D. McMillan, and R. C. Mollan, eds., John Tyndall: Essays on a Natural Philosopher (Dublin: Royal Dublin Society, 2918), 88. Citation from John Tyndall, Heat Considered as a Mode of Motion (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1863), 333.

  44 Tyndall, “Bakerian Lecture,” 6.

  45 Tyndall, “Bakerian Lecture,” 29.

  46 Tyndall, “Bakerian Lecture,” 28.

  47 On Tyndall and Magnus, see Jackson, Tyndall, 166–168.

  48 John Tyndall, “On the Relation of Radiant Heat to Aqueous Vapour,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 153 (1863): 1–12, at 10.

  49 A. S. Eve and C. H. Creasey, Life and Work of John Tyndall (London: Macmillan, 1945).

  50 Tyndall, Glaciers, 205.

  51 Tyndall, Glaciers, 206.

  52 Tyndall, Glaciers, 205.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 Charles Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, An Astronomer’s Experiment, Or, Specialties of a Residence Above the Clouds (London: Lovell Reeve, 1858).

  2 Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799–1804 (London: Longman Hurst, 1814), 110.

  3 Charles Darwin, A Naturalist’s Voyage: Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle Round the World: Under the Commands of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N. (London: John Murray, 1889), 1.

  4 Quoted in Kurt Badt, John Constable’s Clouds (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), 55.

  5 For biographical information on Piazzi Smyth, see Hermann Brück and Mary Brück, The Peripatetic Astronomer: The Life of Charles Piazzi Smyth (Bristol and Philadelphia: Adam Hilger, 1988). For Piazzi Smyth’s role in the visual and popular culture of Victorian meteorology, see Katharine Anderson, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 5; and Katharine Anderson, “Looking at the Sky: The Visual Context of Victorian Meteorology,” British Journal for the History of Science 36, no. 3 (2003): 301–332.

  6 Agnes Clerke, A Popular History of Astronomy during the Nineteenth Century (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1893), 152.

  7 Simon Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time: Discipline and the Personal Equation,” Science in Context 2, no. 1 (1988): 115–145.

  8 Stephen Case, “Land-Marks of the Universe: John Herschel against the Background of Positional Astronomy,” Annals of Science 72, no. 4 (2015): 417–434.

  9 Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative, 110.

  10 Humboldt and Bonpland, Personal Narrative, 182–183.

  11 Alexander von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E. C. Otte (New York: Harper, 1858), 26.

  12 Humboldt, Cosmos, 37.

  13 Alexander von Humboldt, “Beobachtungen über das Gesetz der Wärmeabnahme in den höhern Regionen der Atmosphäre, und über die untern Gränzen des ewigen Schnees,” Annalen der Physik 24 (1806): 1–2.

  14 Michael Dettelbach, “The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in the Work of Alexander von Humboldt,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 30, no. 4 (1999): 473–504.

  15 John Cawood, “The Magnetic Crusade: Science and Politics in Early Victorian Britain,” Isis 70, no. 4 (1979): 492–518.

  16 Clerke, Popular History, 177.

  17 Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, 77.

  18 Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, 90.

  19 Charles Piazzi Smyth, “The Ascent of Teneriffe,” Literary Gazette and Journal of Belles Lettres, Science, and Art, 17 April 1858 (London: Lovell Reed): 377.

  20 Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, 108–109.

  21 Charles Piazzi Smyth, Astronomical Observations Made at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Neill and Company, 1863), 444.

  22 Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, 274.

  23 Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, 320.

  24 Piazzi Smyth, Teneriffe, 288.

  25 Charles Piazzi Smyth, “On Astronomical Drawing,” Memoirs of the Royal Astronomical Society 15 (1946): 75–76.

  26 Charles Babbage, Reflexions on the Decline of Science in England (London: B. Fellowes, 1830), 210–211.

  27 Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London: Alexander Strahan, 1864).

  28 Brück and Brück, Peripatetic Astronomer, 119.

  2
9 Brück and Brück, Peripatetic Astronomer, 177.

  30 David Brewster and J. H. Gladstone, “On the Lines of the Solar Spectrum,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 150 (1860): 152.

  31 See Anderson, Predicting, chapter 5, for a discussion of Piazzi Smyth’s rainband spectroscopy. Charles Piazzi Smyth, “Spectroscopic Weather Discussions,” Nature 26 (5 October 1882): 553.

  32 F. W. Cory, “The Spectroscope as an Aid to Forecasting Weather,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 9, no. 48 (1883): 285.

  33 Piazzi Smyth, “Spectroscopic,” 553.

  34 Charles Piazzi Smyth, “The Spectroscope and the Weather,” Popular Science 22 (1882): 242.

  35 Piazzi Smyth, “Spectroscopic,” 552.

  36 Robert Multhauf, “The Introduction of Self-Registering Meteorological Instruments,” Contributions from the Museum of History and Technology: Paper 23, United States National Museum Bulletin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1961).