Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [28]
Reconciliation of the two branches of knowledge was not to come for several more centuries. In 1582 the great astronomer Tycho Brahe began the work of systematization; he kept a meteorological daybook and began defining the winds not only by the direction but also by their force. His gradations included dead calm, two categories of light winds, five categories of strong winds, three of storms; it was the first wind scale, several hundred years before Beaufort's. But Brahe never took it that one step further, by actually measuring the speed of those winds. At the time, he had no way of doing so.8
In 1622 Francis Bacon, given lots of time for thought during a stint in the Tower of London, produced his Historia Ventorum, or History of the Winds. He still believed that wind was generated by vapors expanding their volume suddenly. Where the winds or the vapors actually came from remained opaque: "The places where there are great stores of vapours [are] the native Countrie of the Windes."9 Ironically, Francis Bacon's illustrious ancestor Roger Bacon, the great medievalist and scientific prodigy, was closer to the mark more than four hundred years earlier when he simply noted in a journal that "heat makes air move." At the time, the observation went unheeded, mostly because the earlier Bacon was so prolix with his supply of ideas and inventions that his contemporaries were some what overwhelmed: He was the first person in the west, for example, to describe gunpowder; he invented spectacles for the eyes; and he was the first person anywhere, as far as is known, to propose mechanically propelled ships and carriages and an airplane with flapping wings. He was later imprisoned for his vocal contempt for his superiors in the Orders of Friars Minor and for his sarcastic views on the "puerilities" of other philosophers of his time.
Those same puerilities were still occasionally being trotted out even after the later Bacon. In 1668 Margaret Lucas Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, published her Grounds of Natural Philosophy in which she asserted that "the strongest winds are made of the grossest vapours. Concerning the Figurative Motions of Vapour and Smoak, they are circles; but of Winds, they are broken Parts of Circular Vapours: for, when the Vaporous Circle is extended beyond its Nature of Vapour, the circumference of the Circle breaks into perturbed Parts; and if the Parts be small, the wind is, in our perception, sharp, pricking and piercing; but, if the Parts are not so small, then the wind is strong and pressing." As much "smoak" as this is, it did contain one new approach: an observation of what the winds actually felt like. Twenty or so years later, in 1684, Dr. Martin Lister, writing in the journal Philosophical Transactions, suggested that trade winds were caused by the constant breath of seaweed. In his view, their very regularity made their origin obvious: "The matter of that [ocean] wind, coming (as we suppose) from the breath of only one Plant it must needs make it constant and uniform: Whereas the great variety of plants and trees at land must needs furnish a confused matter of Wind."10
Despite these eminences, things had begun to change. Galileo helped. A proper lens-grinding technology helped. Precision instruments in the laboratory helped. The slow transformation of alchemy into chemistry helped. Artisans became educated and philosophers descended into the workshop. As early as 1627, the German Joseph Furtenbach fired a cannonball straight into the air to prove that the earth rotated. The ball, when it landed, was a little to the west of where it would have landed on an unmoving earth,