HONG KONG IS NOT a city that lends itself to cloud-watching. An unobscured view of the horizon is as hard to come by as a pleasant afternoon with nothing more to do than lie back and gaze at the sky.
As a result, you might feel initially perplexed by the degree of excitement with which the world greeted a short lecture entitled On The Modifications Of Clouds, delivered in London in 1802. The speaker, a shy and serious young man, had little idea of the stir he was about to cause. But his simple proposition, that there are just three basic families of clouds into which countless thousands of nebulous shapes can be categorised, was to revolutionise meteorology and earn him the adulation of international leaders in fine art, literature and science.
In keeping with the non-fiction approach very much in vogue, Richard Hamblyn's book recalls the life and times of an individual who was to have a great influence on our subsequent understanding of the world. His protagonist is Luke Howard, the son of a conservative Quaker family. But it is far more than Howard's story.
Hamblyn first captures his readers' imagination and attention by vividly bringing to life what he terms the age of the theatre of knowledge, when the cities of Western Europe were gripped by the ascendancy of science. The public's hunger for new information was insatiable, and one of the most popular forms of entertainment in early 19th-century London was the scientific lecture, where crowds would gather to hear researchers expound their theories and watch demonstrations of the latest discoveries in medicine, mathematics, magnetics or mechanics.
By bringing the ethereal sky within the grasp of the rational, Howard catapulted himself into the limelight, and his ideas were soon influencing the works of luminaries such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Constable.
But the unassuming amateur meteorologist, who coined the terms cirrus, cumulus and stratus (from the Latin for hair or fibre, heap or pile, and sheet or layer, respectively) was quite unprepared for his sudden rise to fame and spent much of his life struggling to come to terms with it.
Just as fascinating as Hamblyn's description of period London culture, is his brief history of humanity's long obsession with weather. A modern city-dweller cannot easily imagine a time in which weather was the single-most influential aspect of human experience, and the ability to predict it a holy grail.