MapAid: "The British Weather Conversation" was invented by France
Notes from a hybrid business person & aid worker: Chapter 7
The "British Weather Conversation" was invented by France
We British love to chat about the weather. It’s a deeply comforting little ritual that usefully acts as an icebreaker, from the boardroom to a bus. In recent times our weather discussions and debates often used to revolve around a gentleman by the good name of Mr Michael Fish, or simply Mr. Fish, from the Met Office, who pronounced his weather predictions afar the BBC news on the tv, against a glorious meteorological backdrop of charts. With his Albert Einstein hairstyle and tie and dulcet tones, he pointed to icons here and there and made pithy comments about the weather. It revived our spirits in England. And probably the other Kingdoms too, for that matter.
While there are many worthy contributors to weather chart development, I hate to break the news here, to all you weather British fanatics, it was the French who invented “the Mr Fish weather conversation a la carte météorologie”! Back in the middle of the 19th century… in order to devise a theory on storm systems.
Yes, you heard, “Storm System”!
On November 14th 1854, a French-British fleet was devasted at Balaklava, also known as Sevastopol, which is or rather was, a small sleepy town on the Crimea peninsula in Ukraine. Probably no longer sleepy these days due to current affairs, but that is another tale.
As a result of this storm a French scientist, Monsieur Urbain Le Verrier corresponded with meteorologists and astronomers across Europe and calculated a chronological weather map using data from 250 replies, which illustrated the path it had taken. This applied common sense illustrated how the fleet could have avoided the storm if the commanders had received information a bit earlier about its initial direction and strength.
Le Verrier, building on the work of other scientists later went on to create a pioneering “weather telegraphy network” that inspired weather data to be exchanged between European cities, again, to help map and predict storm directions and intensities…
There you have it.
Someone should make a movie about how the French invented the British weather conversation.
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