The Story Of The Man Who Named All The Clouds In The Sky

“To find yourself in the infinite,You must distinguish and then combine;Therefore my winged song thanksThe man who distinguished cloud from cloud.”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

A ship, hearts, dogs, dinosaurs. As children, we’d spend hours staring at the sky trying to spot all the shapes we could find—a rite of passage if ever there was one. Yet, there was one young man in England who defined what clouds would come to be called, fuelled by the very same pastime, later forming the basis of meteorology as it stands today. His name is Luke Howard—the ‘man who distinguished cloud from cloud’ in Goethe’s poem—and after years of dedicated observation and contemplation, in December 1802 he proposed his studies in a paper titled ‘On the Modification of Clouds,’ presented in a lecture at a London science club, the Askesian Society. A pharmacist by profession, with a fondness for meteorology, Howard was completely enthralled by changes in weather, and the transformative power of clouds, from an early age. His fascination led to him spend scores of hours staring out of his classroom window at the sky, rather than listening to his teachers lecture.

To put it crudely, meteorology is the study of the way that weather works in our world, and nephology is the branch that studies clouds. Richard Hamblyn in his book ‘The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies,’ traces the history of Howard’s naming of the different types of clouds, giving glimpses into the blossoming world of science and what life was like for an ordinary man during the Enlightenment Era and 19th century Romantic period.

Cumulus, Stratus, Cirrus and more 

With a good grasp over Latin, Howard identified and marked three basic kinds of clouds based on height and general structure; Cumulus, meaning heap or pile in Latin, are the most recognised, and really do look like heaps of cotton floating in the sky. They’re also known as fair-weather clouds, so if you spot these in the sky, you probably won’t need to carry your umbrella that day. Stratus, meaning layer or sheet, are the misty veils that commonly occur around mountains and coasts, and are quite dreary, bringing with them drizzles and the sort of humidity that makes it hard to have a frizz-free hair day. Thin and wispy Cirrus clouds are the high-altitude clouds that look like they’re barely moving. The Latin word Cirrus means tendril or hair, and these clouds are so high up in the atmosphere, where the temperature increasingly gets colder, that they’re made up of ice crystals instead of drops of water.

Clouds are constantly moving, changing shapes and spreading out—a fact that Howard had to take into account, and so he extended his list to include Cirrocumulus, Cirrostratus and Cumulo-cirro-stratus or Nimbus clouds, the rain-bearing clouds. Over the years this list has been modified from Howard’s seven to include two more cloud formations; the infamous cloud 9, Cumulonimbus, that we often metaphorically visit, and the tenth being Altostratus.

An inspiration to the science and the arts 

Hamblyn, in his book, speaks of the lasting affect of Howard’s work, not only on meteorology, but the arts as well. It is said that Howard inspired artists and works such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘The Cloud,’ John Constable’s landscape paintings, the writings and art of John Ruskin, and gained the reverence of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His biggest fan till date has to be poet-philosopher and all-round literary genius Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “Howard’s theories of cloud formation thus enhanced the development of Goethe’s own view of the ‘wholeness’ of nature, the achievements and evident humanity of the brilliant young English meteorologist. But this was only the beginning. Goethe’s admiration and his sense of indebtedness to Howard’s meteorological theories did not rest there, but led to one of the most extraordinary personal homages ever paid by one scientific worker to another,” writes Hamblyn.

Howard wasn’t the first person to theorise about the creation of clouds and their formation, since naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had previously put forth a list of descriptive terms for clouds in French, but the success of Howard’s work is attributed to his use of the universal language Latin, which did receive heavy criticism initially since it wasn’t in English, the popularly spoken language of the time. But this was shut down by an emotive defense penned by the man himself, Goethe, and no one thought it fit to mess with Goethe. Howard’s work did not only transform the scientific world of meteorology in his time, that had ripple effects on the arts, but has remained a huge part of the way we look and speak about this aerial phenomenon today, that had, till his time, remained a queer and mysterious occurrence.

We’ve linked for you below a short, fun and highly educative lesson from TED-Ed, where Hamblyn, accompanied by animations done by Nick Hilditch, simply explains the naming of clouds and tells the story of the man with his head in the clouds, Luke Howard.