1In this series of lectures about the history of weather forecasting,
2I'll start by examining its early history -
3that'll be the subject of today's talk.
4Ok, so we'll start by going back thousands of years.
5Most ancient cultures had weather gods,
6and weather catastrophes, such as floods,
7played an important role in many creation myths.
8Generally, weather was attributed to the whims of the gods,
9as the wide range of weather gods in various cultures shows.
10For instance, there's the Egyptian sun god Ra,
11and Thor, the Norse god of thunder and lightning.
12Many ancient civilisations developed rites such as dances
13in order to make the weather gods look kindly on them.
14But the weather was of daily importance:
15observing the skies and drawing the correct conclusions from these observations was really important,
16in fact their survival depended on it.
17It isn't known when people first started to observe the skies,
18but at around 650 BC,
19the Babylonians produced the first short-range weather forecasts,
20based on their observations of clouds and other phenomena.
21The Chinese also recognised weather patterns,
22and by 300 BC,
23astronomers had developed a calendar which divided the year into 24 festivals,
24each associated with a different weather phenomenon.
25The ancient Greeks were the first to develop a more scientific approach to explaining the weather.
26The work of the philosopher and scientist Aristotle, in the fourth century BC, is especially noteworthy,
27as his ideas held sway for nearly 2,000 years.
28In 340 BC,
29he wrote a book in which he attempted to account for the formation of rain, clouds, wind and storms.
30He also described celestial phenomena such as haloes -
31that is, bright circles of light around the sun, the moon and bright stars - and comets.
32Many of his observations were surprisingly accurate.
33For example, he believed that heat could cause water to evaporate.
34But he also jumped to quite a few wrong conclusions,
35such as that winds are breathed out by the Earth.
36Errors like this were rectified from the Renaissance onwards.
37For nearly 2,000 years,
38Aristotle's work was accepted as the chief authority on weather theory.
39Alongside this, though, in the Middle Ages,
40weather observations were passed on in the form of proverbs,
41such as 'Red sky at night, shepherd's delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning'.
42Many of these are based on very good observations and are accurate,
43as contemporary meteorologists have discovered.
44For centuries, any attempt to forecast the weather could only be based on personal observations,
45but in the fifteenth century scientists began to see the need for instruments.
46Until then, the only ones available were weathervanes - to determine the wind direction -
47and early versions of rain gauges.
48One of the first, invented in the fifteenth century, was a hygrometer, which measured humidity.
49This was one of many inventions that contributed to the development of weather forecasting.
50In 1592, the Italian scientist and inventor Galileo developed the world's first thermometer.
51His student Torricelli later invented the barometer,
52which allowed people to measure atmospheric pressure.
53In 1648, the French philosopher Pascal proved that pressure decreases with altitude.
54This discovery was verified by English astronomer Halley in 1686,
55and Halley was also the first person to map trade winds.
56This increasing ability to measure factors related to weather
57helped scientists to understand the atmosphere and its processes better,
58and they started collecting weather observation data systematically.
59In the 18th century, the scientist and politician Benjamin Franklin
60carried out work on electricity and lightning in particular,
61but he was also very interested in weather and studied it throughout most of his life.
62It was Franklin who discovered that storms generally travel from west to east.
63In addition to new meteorological instruments,
64other developments contributed to our understanding of the atmosphere.
65People in different locations began to keep records,
66and in the mid-nineteenth century,
67the invention of the telegraph made it possible for these records to be collated.
68This led, by the end of the nineteenth century, to the first weather services.
69It was not until the early twentieth century that mathematics and physics became part of meteorology,
70and we'll continue from that point next week.