Reviews for Defining the Wind
Review - Defining the Wind
A strange, wandering book somewhat similar to Longitude, by Dava Sobel. If you enjoyed that one, you’ll probably enjoy this one.
Huler runs across the Beaufort scale of wind measurement in a dictionary and is struck by the poetic nature of the descriptions. He sets out to discover who Beaufort was and how he developed the scale.
It turns out Beaufort was British Admiral Francis Beaufort, and he didn’t, in fact, develop the scale or write it out in the poetic form Huler admires. What he did was popularize it as part of his job as hydrographer for the Admiralty. But Beaufort turns out to be an interesting guy anyway, and the book follows his life and adventures. It also follows the development of the scale from its earliest appearance to today, touching on characters like Daniel Defoe and Charles Darwin. Ultimately, the book is a revelation of how earlier generations observed life around them and found ways to record their observations for practical use.
Here’s just one of many interesting places the narrative travels: “In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a personal friend of Beaufort’s, left England with the ships Erebus and Terror, in search of the Northwest Passage, with three years’ worth of supplies. Those ships were soon crushed in the Arctic ice and abandoned by their crews, who ultimately died trekking overland. When no word had returned by 1848, rescue missions were mounted, and over the next years several also unsuccessful search parties were sent, by sea and land, from east and west. One of those ships, the Resolute, saved the crew of one of the previous search parties, though the Resolute, too, eventually lodged in the ice and was abandoned. Embarrassingly, it thereafter broke free and drifted east, where it was salvaged by an American whaling ship and eventually presented back to the Admiralty as a gift. The ship was subsequently dismantled, and a desk made from pieces of the Resolute was presented in 1880 by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes. President Kennedy brought it into the Oval Office, where it’s been on and off since then. Today President Bush sits behind a desk made from a ship sent on its greatest adventure by Francis Beaufort.”
I love knowing stuff like that.
The story gets lost in many places, in my opinion, wandering too far off the track. But there’s enough interesting stuff to make it worth while to keep reading, and it is charmingly free of the evolutionary “fact” that muck up most books on the history of science.
Huler runs across the Beaufort scale of wind measurement in a dictionary and is struck by the poetic nature of the descriptions. He sets out to discover who Beaufort was and how he developed the scale.
It turns out Beaufort was British Admiral Francis Beaufort, and he didn’t, in fact, develop the scale or write it out in the poetic form Huler admires. What he did was popularize it as part of his job as hydrographer for the Admiralty. But Beaufort turns out to be an interesting guy anyway, and the book follows his life and adventures. It also follows the development of the scale from its earliest appearance to today, touching on characters like Daniel Defoe and Charles Darwin. Ultimately, the book is a revelation of how earlier generations observed life around them and found ways to record their observations for practical use.
Here’s just one of many interesting places the narrative travels: “In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a personal friend of Beaufort’s, left England with the ships Erebus and Terror, in search of the Northwest Passage, with three years’ worth of supplies. Those ships were soon crushed in the Arctic ice and abandoned by their crews, who ultimately died trekking overland. When no word had returned by 1848, rescue missions were mounted, and over the next years several also unsuccessful search parties were sent, by sea and land, from east and west. One of those ships, the Resolute, saved the crew of one of the previous search parties, though the Resolute, too, eventually lodged in the ice and was abandoned. Embarrassingly, it thereafter broke free and drifted east, where it was salvaged by an American whaling ship and eventually presented back to the Admiralty as a gift. The ship was subsequently dismantled, and a desk made from pieces of the Resolute was presented in 1880 by Queen Victoria to President Rutherford B. Hayes. President Kennedy brought it into the Oval Office, where it’s been on and off since then. Today President Bush sits behind a desk made from a ship sent on its greatest adventure by Francis Beaufort.”
I love knowing stuff like that.
The story gets lost in many places, in my opinion, wandering too far off the track. But there’s enough interesting stuff to make it worth while to keep reading, and it is charmingly free of the evolutionary “fact” that muck up most books on the history of science.
Reviewed by Roger on 2005-03-02 21:23:44