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Defining the Wind: the Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry

Natural History, Nov, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry by Scott Huler Crown Publishers, 2004; $23.00

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The remarkable life of Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857), one of the generation of polymaths who ushered in a golden age of natural history, in Victorian England, seems the perfect subject for a modern biographer. Beaufort began his adventures at sea at age fourteen, captained a Royal Navy ship by age twenty-two, and for more than twenty years seldom seemed to step onto dry land. In 1817 he wrote a best-selling travel book--illustrated with his own meticulous drawings--about the little-known southern coast of Turkey, where a grievous wound sustained during a brawl with the locals ended his seafaring career. In the succeeding three decades he served as chief of the admiralty's Hydrographic Office, consolidating Britain's rule of the seas by fostering the scientific observation of the oceans and the exploration of remote shores. Beaufort was on friendly terms with Captain William Bligh, of Bounty fame, and with Captain Robert Fitzroy of the Beagle, as he was with most of the scientific luminaries of the age. It was Beaufort, in fact, who suggested to the young Charles Darwin that he sail with the Beagle as its onboard naturalist.

Yet Scott Huler's book is not exactly a biography of Beaufort, who has already been well served by historians and biographers. Rather, it is more of an extended essay on what Huler, a journalist by trade, learned while tracking down the story of the admiral's most lasting accomplishment: a twelve-step numbering system for gauging the strength of winds. The Beaufort scale, of course, has become a part of the standard operating lingo for meteorologists and sailors. Huler, who first noticed it twenty years ago in a dictionary, was immediately smitten by its economy, its matter-of-fact utility, and its almost poetic imagery and cadence: "0: calm smoke rises vertically"; "6: strong breeze; large branches in motion; telegraph wires whistle; umbrellas used with difficulty"; "9: strong gale; slight structural damage occurs; chimney pots and slates removed." Like Beaufort, who filled dozens of pocket notebooks with daily observations of anything that struck his fancy, Huler began to fill notebooks with odd facts and observations about the wind and about the origins and evolution of the Beaufort scale.

Much of his research, as one might expect, was done in library stacks and government archives, where Huler found, unsurprisingly, that Beaufort's wind scale was not the first of its kind. Daniel Defoe, in a 1704 book called The Storm, had organized winds into categories, as had Robert Hooke in the 1600s and Tycho Brahe in the late 1500s. In 1759 John Smeaton, a British engineer, defined a hierarchy of winds on the basis of how fast they turned a windmill. In about 1790 Alexander Dalrymple, one of Beaufort's predecessors in the Hydrographic Office, devised a table combining Smeaton's scale for windmills with the descriptions used in ships' journals to record the force of the wind.

Although it's doubtful that Beaufort ever saw that table (it appeared in a text, Practical Navigation, that was never published), Dalrymple's work anticipated Beaufort's first scale, with its descriptive phrases based on the number of sails a standard three-masted vessel could keep aloft in a particular wind. That scale was widely adopted and bears Beaufort's name, largely because of his preeminence at a time when Britain ruled the waves.

What makes Huler's book exceptional, however, is his absorbing account of how he tried to empathize with Beaufort, to find out what kind of person would devise and use such a scale. Huler took a boat to Montevideo, Uruguay, toting the young oceanographer's 1806 sketches and charts of the harbor, to relive some of Beaufort's experiences. He sailed on board a three-masted bark, the Europa, to feel the wind the way it must have felt to a nineteenth-century seaman. He interviewed historians, weathercasters, even poets and musicians who had been inspired by Beaufort's scheme.

What did he learn from it all? That the numbers are not what give the Beaufort scale its lasting value. After all, modern anemometers can read off wind speeds to as many decimal places as there are numbers on an LCD display. The true value is the message implicit in its lucid prose, inspiring us to observe nature with the wide-eyed empathy of a curious naturalist. Look beyond the numbers, Huler tells us; look to the meaning, not just the ranking, of the wind.

LAURENCE A. MARSHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is the W.K.T. Sahm professor of physics as Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

Defining the Wind: the Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry

Natural History, Nov, 2004 by Laurence A. Marschall

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