Clouds, technically speaking, are aerosols consisting of a visible mass of liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in an atmosphere. There is a whole science of clouds, called “nephology.” And in addition to the “stratus,” cumulus,” and other common types of clouds, there’s an extensive nomenclature system identifying types of clouds based on their altitude, appearance, and whether they’re likely to rain on you. And for that we have Luke Howard to thank — he was born November 28, 1772 in England.
As a complete aside, by the way, the fact that we call the things “clouds” in English is a bit odd. Old English had a word for clouds: “weolcan.” But it also had a word for a hill: “clod.” Some clouds look like hills, and eventually the metaphorical term “clod” took over for the literal term “weolcan.” Why did this happen? The reasons are…cloudy.
But back to Luke Howard. He’s still known as “The Godfather of Clouds,” at least in some places. He was a pharmacist, and in the late 1700s set up a business (Allen and Howard) to manufacture drugs and chemicals. The company lasted until 1975, renamed as Howard and Sons. But his real passion wasn’t chemistry or business; it was meteorology. He kept detailed records of the weather in London for 40 years, and in 1803 wrote Essay on the Modification of Clouds.
At the time Carl von Linne had become well known for his Linnaean taxonomy of biological kingdoms, classes, and so on, and Howard intentionally copied that approach in classifying clouds. His main categories were cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, and he combined those for “transitional” forms like cirrostratus. His Essay included illustrations of clouds he drew himself, but he was unable to depict a realistic landscape underneath them, so he hired a painter to fill in the terrain beneath his aerosols consisting of a visible mass.”
Howard contributed cloud forms to English, but not all the words he coined were widely adopted. For instance, he called the process of cloud formation “nubification,” which is a word you’ll never find outside of his writing.
He also theorized about clouds — firstly that they were made of water vapor, which is correct, but also mostly created by electricity, which turned out not to be the case. And as often happens, he wasn’t the only one working on a cloud classification system at the time. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was doing the same thing in France. Neither man was aware of the other. and Lamarck published his taxonomy the very same year that Howard published his. Howard’s was the one that caught on, though, possibly because he based his terms on Latin, while Lamarck’s terms were all French. Also Lamarck’s publication didn’t have any pictures.
Howard has been remembered in some unusual ways. The German writer Goethe wrote a set of poems about his work. The painter Caspar Friedrich produced a series of paintings of clouds. Percy Bysse Shelley wrote a poem The Cloud that was supposedly inspired by Howard’s work. He also appears in the novel The Theory of Clouds, published in 2005. There is a blue plaque attached to the house where he died at 91, although all it says is “Luke Howard, Namer of Clouds, lived and died here.” But it’s a bit ironic that Howard’s biggest accomplishment was naming things, and so far there’s nothing named after him.
