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no doubt to Furtenbach's relief (he was standing next to the cannon all the time). In 1639 Galileo essayed a variant of Aristotle's leather bag experiment. He manufactured a glass bulb with an airtight valve and sucked the air out. Then he weighed it. Next he forced air back in and weighed it again. There was a measurable difference. Aristotle's idea had been right, but his instruments defective, and Galileo was able to prove that air did, despite Aristotle's claim, have weight. A mere five years later, in 1644, Galileo's apprentice, Evangelista Torricelli, used his master's experiment to construct the first barometer, although the word barometer wasn't used until 1668, when Robert Boyle coined it for his own similar device. Whatever it was called, Torricelli's device was nevertheless the crucial breakthrough. For the first time a way existed to accurately measure a meteorological phenomenon.

The practical men, too, were observing nature ever more accurately. In 1626 Captain John Smith, notorious exaggerator of his own derring-do ("puller of the longbow," as historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it) and best known for his role in the Pocahontas saga, put together his Sea Grammar, with its careful observation of the various winds and of the proper terms therefor: "When there is not a breath of wind stirring, it is a calme or a starke calme. A Breze is a wind blows out of the Sea, and commonly in faire weather beginneth about nine on the morning, and lasteth til neere night; so likewise all night it is from the shore . . . A fresh Gale is that doth presently blow after a Calme, when the wind beginneth to quicken or blow. A faire Loome Gale is the best to sail in, because the Sea goeth not high, and we beare out all our Sailes. A stiffe Gale is so much wind as our topsailes can endure to beare . . . It over blowed when we can beare no top-sails. A flaw of wind is a Gust which is very violent upon a sudden, but quickly endeth . . . A storme is knowne to every one not to bee much lesse than a tempest, that will blow down houses, and trees up by the roots . . . A Hericano is so violent in the West Indies, it will continue three, foure, or five weekes, but they have it not past once in five, six or seven yeeres; but then it is with such extremity that the Sea flies like raine, and the waves so high, they over flow the low grounds by the Sea, in so much, that ships have been driven over tops of high trees there growing, many leagues into the land, and there left." A little longbow-pulling there in his description of a hericano, but otherwise useful enough.

In 1654 John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts colony, recorded the first use of the current spelling of hurricane, when he wrote in his History of New England of the "great colonial hurricane" that had just passed by.

In 1663 Robert Hooke suggested "a Method for making a History of the Weather" by observing and recording "the Strength and quarter of the Winds." He recommended a scale from one to four, which included half numbers, so it was really a scale of nine.

Eminent explorer and notorious pirate William Dampier was even more precise. In 1687 he encountered a major storm in the South China Sea: "Typhoons," he wrote, "are sorts of violent whirlwinds"— the first time this observation had been recorded. "Before these whirlwinds come on . . . there appears a heavy cloud to the northeast which is very black towards the horizon, but towards the upper part is a dull reddish color. The tempest came with great violence, but after a while the winds ceased all at once and a calm succeeded. This lasted . . . an hour more or less, then the gales were turned around, flowing with great fury from the southwest."

In the middle of the eighteenth century, astronomer Edmund Halley, of comet fame, published an article in Philosophical Transactions that declared the cause of winds to be the heating of air by the sun. He wasn't quite right—he suggested that winds blow primarily from the east because the sun rises there, thereby making the classical mistake of generalizing from an