Cloudman Foreword

I have been involved with clouds in a serious professional way for six decades. As seen in the bio profile, during the first decade I was a weather forecaster for the young and expanding Pan American World airways as it pioneered air routes to the Orient and to New Zealand and Australia, using the Martin and Boeing four engine flying boats -- the Clippers. During the last five decades I have been teaching and writing about meteorology in a college setting.

Looking back, it seems quite odd that Luke Howard was only a name to me until the '70s. I suppose I read somewhere, perhaps in a cloud atlas, that "Luke Howard, English manufacturing chemist, originally proposed the names "Cumulus, Stratus, Nimbus and Cirrus" but I knew little about Howard the man. On the other hand, this is not odd at all, for there is very little written about Howard in meteorological literature that is read by the ordinary student, or by the general public. Through this medium, I hope we can do a little bit to change this.

My situation changed in 1971 when, through a sabbatical leave from my (Linfield) college, I was able to spend some months in the British Meteorological office science library, locate in Bracknell some 50 miles SW of London. During this period I read extensively and became intimately acquainted with the history of clouds and cloud atlases, and inevitably with Luke Howard and his contributions to the infant science of meteorology, and, in particular, to the establishment of cloud nomenclature.

The Howard I came to know was a many-faceted man. He was a "whole" man. His love of clouds, and weather, started at an early age and never diminished. He was not a scientist and never pretended to be one. He trained for, and became, a businessman, developing a firm that manufactured pharmaceutical chemicals: Howards and Sons Ltd. The study of weather, begun as a schoolboy, was close to his heart and continued for a lifetime. Because of his many contributions to the emerging science of meteorology, in 1821 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor his peers could confer. He was a lifelong member of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) and devoted much energy and time to the good works of this denomination. He was a devoted family man. He was a prolific writer and editor. His Seven lectures in Meteorology comprised the first textbook in weather. His Climate of London was the first book in urban climatology.