reading

The original writer is not the one who refrains from imitating others, but one who can be imitated by none.

François René Chateaubriand

If few popular writers succeed in carving such a niche for themselves that they become irreplaceable, then Brendan McWilliams was surely the exception. His daily Weather Eye column, which ran in The Irish Times for almost twenty years, conveyed eloquently the popular aspects of meteorology, climate, astronomy and the environment. Easy to digest, and sprinkled lightly with literature, history, folklore and mischievous humour, it was often the first article to which readers turned each morning.

This book represents a labour of love for my mother, Anne. Containing some of the best examples of Weather Eye, it is a collection of pieces from 2006—a period when my father was, perhaps, at his creative peak. In response to the numerous letters and emails he received almost daily from readers requesting another book, he was in the process of preparing A Weather Eye on Weather Lore and had further plans for A Weather Eye on History. Alas, these projects were hardly underway when he learned suddenly of his illness, and was obliged by his doctors to take some rest. Sadly, Dad passed away a few weeks later, on 22 October 2007.

But let us go back to the beginning. Brendan McWilliams was born on 7 August 1944 and grew up in Waterville, Co. Kerry, where his father, Seán, was the meteorologist in charge of the nearby Valentia Observatory. My father graduated in science from University College Cork in 1964, and later in Business Administration from University College Dublin. He worked as a meteorologist throughout his adult life and, during the 1970s, was well known as a presenter of the daily weather forecast on RTÉ radio and television. For much of the 1990s, he was Assistant Director of Met Éireann, and a frequent Delegate of Ireland at meetings of numerous bodies concerned with international co-operation in meteorology. Finally, from 1998 until his retirement in 2004, he was Director of Administration and a member of the Management Board of the European Meteorological Satellite Organisation (EUMETSAT) in Germany.

Amidst all this, the Weather Eye column began quietly on 9 August 1988. Dad composed his earliest offerings on an ancient Olivetti typewriter, often churning out half-a-dozen drafts that my mother would diligently edit, until a finished manuscript was finally arrived upon. This was a daily routine, each piece generally written thirty-six hours in advance and delivered the following morning on his way to work. Monday’s article was the only exception, because Dad did not travel to work on Sundays. I was dispatched instead, a mere lad of fourteen, bus fare in one hand and envelope in the other, ready to deliver my precious cargo to the Duty Chief Sub-Editor at the Irish Times offices in Fleet Street.

The old mechanical typewriter was eventually replaced by an electric one, and then by a painfully slow Amstrad computer that seemed to run on coal. But it was not until the arrival of email that I was spared my Sunday afternoon trips into town. Later, during Dad’s time in Germany, each of the numerous business trips or holidays around Europe would be marked first by the search for a local internet café so that the article might be emailed each afternoon without hindrance. Indeed, in over nineteen years of writing, he never once missed a deadline, and was proud to call Weather Eye the longest-running daily column in an Irish newspaper by a single author until its final instalment on 3 October 2007.

But to those of us who knew him best, the so-called ‘Clerk of the Weather’ seemed to lead a kind of double life. Far from being a public figure, he was our Dad: a family man, warm and wise; a voracious and curious reader, often with several books on the go at once. He had a wonderfully dry and irreverent sense of humour and a real grasp of irony. With a single well-placed remark or a subtle statement of the obvious, he made the ordinary seem suddenly absurd, exposed for what it truly was. There was always laughter in our house.

Dad, of course, loved Shakespeare. As children, when sending us off to bed, he would quote from Hamlet as he bid us, ‘…Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ His passion for literature and history can be felt at the turn of almost every page in this book. Similarly, his concern for the environment is evident, as is his desire to impart what he saw as the inevitable truth about global warming. He was fastidious in his research, regarding himself as a ‘magpie’ who would ferret out and collect serendipitous pieces of information before weaving them into something useful. He relied upon his readers and Met Service colleagues to help him in this task, and was continuously grateful to those who wrote to him with helpful suggestions.

His achievements were many. He was awarded, in 1999, Honorary Life Membership of the Royal Dublin Society and, in 2005, Honorary Membership of the Irish Meteorological Society. But he remained, throughout, a modest figure, a true gentleman who lived—as he wrote—with great warmth and lightness of touch. Some of his best work is captured within this volume; something for everyone, perhaps, from Napoleon’s restoration of the Gregorian calendar to the search for sea level. What a truly original writer. I am proud to have called him Father.

‘Le calendrier gregorien sera mis en usage dans tout l’Empire francais.’ Napoleon’s proclamation restoring the Gregorian Calendar to official use throughout the French Empire came into effect 200 years ago yesterday, on 1 January 1806. It brought to an end what was, literally, a Revolutionary experiment in chronology, and one which was not without its merits.

With the establishment of the Republic in 1792, the entire French administrative infrastructure was carefully reviewed. As part of this, the Academy of Sciences was ordered to produce a suitable French alternative to the traditional Gregorian way of reckoning the months and years, and so it was that a new Republican Calendar was unveiled the following year.

The twelve months of the new Calendar were uniformly 30 days in length, and were given names according to a system devised by the poet Philippe Fabre d’Eglantine, intended to reflect the French climate and the cycle of its agricultural year. Thus ‘Rain’ or pluviose occurred in what had once been January, germinal or ‘Seed-Time’ began in March, and thermidor occurred during the sultry days that coincided with the height of summer. The months were distinguished according to season by their suffixes, the autumn months ending in -aire, the winter ones in -ose, the spring in -al, and the summer months in -dor.

Since the twelve months together amounted to only 360 days, the extra five or six required to keep in step with Nature were added here and there, and designated as festivals or public holidays. In addition, the seven-day week was abandoned, and each month was divided into three decades, with the last day of each decade being a rest day.

New Year’s Day was to be at the autumn equinox. Moreover, it was decided that the new arrangements should be back-dated to 22 September 1792, which not only saw the beginning of the new Republic, but had also been, by coincidence, the autumn equinox in that particular year.

The Republican Calendar was remarkably accurate in its construction. Its year had an average length of 365.24225 days, a difference of only five days in 100,000 years, compared to what we now know to be the proper figure. And the names devised by Fabre d’Eglantine were both attractive and ingenious, even if the zone in which they could be used with their intended logic was geographically limited.

But despite its accuracy and many elements of common sense, France’s new Calendar never quite caught on. It was widely used during its official 13 years in force for conducting the affairs of State, but your average tumbrel-driver on the Rue St Jacques was not impressed and the ordinary people found it hard to change from the Gregorian system to which they had been long accustomed. Perhaps the most frequently heard complaint was that with the Republican Calendar they now had only one day off in ten—instead of one in seven.

‘Dear Brendan,’ wrote a correspondent recently, ‘I read with much interest your article on the colours of the Moon, and towards the end you explain why the daytime Moon appears white because of the blue influence of the sky. But why is the sky blue?’ The question has been addressed, of course, several times in Weather Eye before, but for completeness’ sake, let us recap.

Light, as we know, is a wave motion. And if you watch waves moving along the surface of a body of water, you will notice that an obstruction of an appropriate size—a rock, for instance—disrupts the original wave train, and sends other sets of wavelets off in various directions. Light waves are affected in the same way by the tiny molecules of our atmosphere, by a process known as scattering.

Now light acquires its colour from its wavelength. Blue light, for example, has a very short wavelength, while the wavelength of red light is relatively long; the ‘white’ light from the Sun is a mixture of all the colours of the spectrum from blue, through yellow, green and orange, to red. As it happens, the molecules of air in our atmosphere are of such a size that they scatter the very short wavelengths of blue light much more efficiently than they do the longer ones of the other colours. A little of the red and orange is scattered, for example, but the proportion is small compared to the amount of blue.

When you look at a part of the sky away from the Sun, you see sunlight which was originally heading in an entirely different direction, but which has been scattered towards you by the atmosphere. And since, by and large, only the very short blue waves are affected in this way, you see the scattered light—and therefore most of the sky—as blue.

Near the horizon, matters are more complex. At this very shallow angle the sunlight scattered in our direction approaches us almost horizontally through the air and must travel a much longer path than usual before it reaches us. Because of this long distance, the scattered blue light is subject to further attenuation on its journey by the atmosphere; it is ‘re-scattered’ before it reaches our eyes, and much of it is, therefore, extinguished. But the small amounts of orange and red light which were originally scattered in our direction are likely to survive this long journey with little further interference. In this way, the balanced proportions required to produce white light are virtually restored, so near the horizon, looking away from the Sun, the sky is as near to white as makes no difference.

If, on the other hand, our planet had no atmosphere to scatter light, the Sun would appear as pure white, and all the rest of the sky would be a dark and inky black.

‘This night makes an end wholly of Christmas,’ recorded Samuel Pepys in his diary, ‘with a mind fully satisfied with the great pleasures we have had. And it is high time to betake myself to my late vows, that I may for a great while do my duty and increase my good name and esteem in the world, and get money which sweetens all things and whereof I have much need.’ And then, even if he had not told us so explicitly, we have a clue as to which the night might be: ‘After dinner to the Duke’s house, and there saw Twelfth Night acted well, though it be but a silly play and not relating at all to the name or day.’

It is strange to think of William Shakespeare at a loss for a title for a play, but that allegedly was the case on this occasion. The name, as Pepys noted, has nothing whatever to do with the convoluted contents of the play itself, but recalls the fact that it was written to be performed for the first time at the Twelfth Night revelries, probably those of January 1601.

Twelfth Night is tonight, the eve of Old Christmas Day, or the night before Nollaig na mBan as it was called in Ireland, the day on which women had the traditional privilege of resting from their housework. Its significance stems partly from the old Julian Calendar used in these parts until 1752, by which Christmas Day fell on the day we now designate the 6th of January. Twelfth Night in former times was an occasion for great merry-making. Whoever found the bean in the Twelfth Night cake became the Bean King, and set the tone for the festivities; at the end of the party all decorations were taken down, and the holly and ivy were carefully stowed away to be used to start the fire on which the pancakes would be made on Shrove Tuesday.

It was also believed that a sneak preview of the weather for the coming year could be obtained easily by keeping a close eye on conditions ‘between Christmas and the Kings’. The idea was that the Twelve Days of Christmas were ‘days of fate’, each symbolically governing the character of the month that occupies the corresponding place for the succeeding year.

‘What the weather shall be on the sixth and twentieth day of December,’ wrote Gervase Markham—who, coincidentally, was a contemporary of Shakespeare and one of that select band of talented writers who are sometimes suspected of having written many of the plays—‘the like shall it be in the month of January; what it shall be on the seventh and twentieth, the like shall be the following February; and so on until the Twelfth Day, each day’s weather foreshowing a month of the year.’

Robert Browning, as far as I know, never visited America. Yet one of his better known poems, ‘Prospice’, is remarkably prescient of a meteorological phenomenon prevalent at this time of year in western parts of the United States. You will remember the little verse from school:

Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,

The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote

I am nearing the place.

Down the centuries, fog has always had a sinister reputation. Mediaeval fogs were dreaded as the embodiment of an unhealthy dampness, as catalysts for rheumatic aches and pains, and as evil vectors for every kind of ague and fever. Nor indeed were these fears always without foundation; during the London fog which began on 5 December 1952, and lasted several weeks, the death rate more than doubled and it was reckoned that, allowing for ‘normal’ mortality, the foggy spell had claimed 4,000 people’s lives.

The pogonip was feared for similar reasons, and indeed its very name has lethal connotations, deriving as it does from the language of the Shoshone Indians in which the word ‘pogonip’—or pakenappeh—means ‘white death’. A report in the American Meteorological Journal in 1887, for example, has it that ‘To breathe the pogonip is death to the lungs, and when it comes, the people rush for cover. When it ascends from the valleys its chill embrace is so much feared by the Indians, who are predisposed to infections of the lungs, that they change their camp if apprised by the atmospheric conditions that the dreaded fog is imminent.’

When fog exists at sub-zero temperatures, a white crystalline deposit known as rime may be seen to build up on the windward side of obstacles like shrubs or garden fences. This ‘freezing fog’, which we see occasionally in Ireland, is composed of water droplets that are ‘supercooled’, continuing to exist in the liquid state at temperatures well below the normal freezing point of water. A supercooled water droplet, however, quickly freezes when it comes into contact with a solid object.

Sometimes, however, when the temperature is very low indeed, excess water vapour in the atmosphere condenses directly into ice crystals rather than into tiny droplets of water. This is the pogonip, common in wintertime in the vicinity of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. As with rime, ice crystals drifting in the air adhere to trees and fences, often forming spectacular patterns; some say the colliding crystals can be heard to tinkle in the air as they jostle gently with each other.

We know now, however, that unlike the London fogs, the pogonip is harmless. It is likely that its sinister reputation arose from the prevalence of tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century, and the fact that breathing harsh, cold air, whether containing little particles of ice or not, probably exacerbates existing conditions of the lungs.

. . . yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Some birds are still here, of course, flitting aimlessly from ruined choir to shaking bough, but Shakespeare is right: the joie de vivre is gone and no bird sings; all huddle silently together along the very base of Maslow’s famous triangle.

Many have simply gone away, but it has not always been clear precisely where they went. The sixteenth-century Archbishop Olaus Magnus of Uppsala had the theory that swallows, for example, descend first into the reeds in autumn ‘and thence into the waters below them, bound mouth to mouth, wing to wing, and foot to foot’. Fishermen, it was said, might often draw up a lumpy mass of these coagulated birds, and if the lump were warmed, the swallows would revive and start their summer antics a month or two too soon.

Giraldus Cambrensis, too, a frequent visitor to Ireland in the twelfth century, seemed to hint in his Topographia Hiberniae at a similar notion as to how birds might survive the rigours of winter: ‘It is remarkable’, he wrote, ‘about birds that are accustomed to disappear during the winter that in the interval, neither dead nor alive, they seem to continue living in their vital spirit and at the same time to be seized up into a long ecstasy and some middle state between life and death.’

The local availability of food is the main criterion determining where individuals spend their winter. Birds like the swallow who feed almost entirely on the wing have no choice but to migrate southwards when the chilly autumn weather brings a dearth of airborne insects. Farther north, wading birds and waterfowl, imperilled by freezing water, are obliged to make their way southwards to our more temperate shores. Other species, which depend on convective air currents induced by solar warmth to keep them aloft while hunting, move southwards when lower temperatures remove any liveliness the air might have.

Those birds remaining must survive on whatever food they find. Some depend on seeds and berries, while scavengers like gulls and crows eat anything from discarded household waste to crops unharvested in fields, or other animals killed upon the roads. And all must survive the bitter, winter cold.

The riskiness of a non-migratory strategy is inherent in the fact that resident songbirds tend to produce several broods a year, each containing as many as a dozen eggs; migratory species, by contrast, in general lay fewer eggs and breed but once. The reason for the difference is assumed to be that the resident species have a higher mortality rate in winter than that experienced by their travelling cousins, even taking into account the lengthy, hazardous journeys undertaken by the latter.

Today’s forecasters conjure up predictions from their weather maps, or furtively extract the future from computer print-outs. In times gone by, however, such predictive skills were sometimes quite innate. Mother Shipton, for example, specialised in very long-range forecasts and in many spheres her record seems impressive.

She was born Ursula Sontheil in 1488, her arrival in this world, it is said, having come about as a result of a brief dalliance between her teenage mother and the Prince of Darkness on a stormy night. It was stormy, too, on the day that she was born, but it is recorded that ‘the tempest could not affright the women more than the prodigious physiognomy of the child; the body was long but very big-boned; she had great gobbling eyes, very sharp and fiery, and a nose of unproportionable length, having in it many crooks and turnings adorned with great pimples’.

Be that as it may, young Ursula grew up to be a strange, unworldly creature, who lived for 80 years or thereabouts in her native town of Knaresborough in Yorkshire. In 1512 she married a carpenter called Toby Shipton, who appears to have contributed nothing more to history than to provide his wife with the name by which we know her now. Mother Shipton became famous even in her lifetime for her prophecies, and she recorded her visions of the future in iambic verse.

She was remarkably percipient about the future of technology, particularly for one writing in the early sixteenth century. She has proved to be equally accurate, for example, on such widely diverse topics as ladies’ fashions, combine harvesters, films, aeroplanes and submarines:

For in those wondrous far off days,

The women shall adopt a craze

To dress like men, and trousers wear,

And to cut off their locks of hair;

And roaring monsters, with men atop,

Shall seem to eat the verdant crop.

And men shall fly as birds do now,

And give away the horse and plough.

Pictures shall come alive with movements free,

And boats, like fishes, swim beneath the sea.

So perhaps we ought to listen to what Mother Shipton has to say on climate matters:

The tides will rise beyond their ken

To bite away the shores, and then,

The flooding waters rushing in,

Will flood the lands with such a din

That mankind cowers in muddy fen

And snarls about his fellow men.

Not every land on earth will sink;

Those that do not will stench and stink

Of rotting bodies of beast and man,

And vegetation crisped on land.

Could this be a cautionary insight into the consequences of unmitigated greenhouse warming?

Two hundred years ago today, on the morning of 13 January 1806, the three-masted frigate HMS Woolwich sailed with the tide from the Isle of Wight, bound for the West Indies. Her captain, 32-year-old Commander Francis Beaufort from Navan, County Meath, dined alone in his cabin that evening and afterwards wrote up his journal: ‘Hereafter I shall estimate the force of the wind according to the following scale, since nothing can convey a more uncertain idea of the wind than the old expressions of moderate and stiff, etc., etc.’ This initiative was to bring him worldwide and permanent recognition in far greater measure than any heroic sea battle in which he might ever have been engaged.

Beaufort enumerated 14 wind forces, from zero to 13, in a list which closely resembles the Beaufort Scale we use today. But the idea in this form was not original; his scale was only a slight variation of one devised in 1779 by Alexander Dalrymple of the East India Company, who had in turn borrowed an idea proposed to the Royal Society in 1759 by the engineer John Smeaton in a paper on windmills.

In 1810, however, Beaufort, now commander of the Blossom, added his personal stamp to what was to become the Beaufort Scale. He refined it to 13 forces, and included for each a description of how much canvas the typical full-rigged man-o’-war could comfortably carry. A light air, Force 1, for example, was a wind just sufficient ‘to give steering way’; a moderate breeze, Force 2, was a wind such that a ‘well-conditioned man-o’-war, under all sail . . . would go in smooth water at from 5 to 6 knots’; with Force 8, a whole gale, the same ship could only bear ‘close-reefed main topsails and a reefed foresail’; and the highest number, hurricane, Force 12, was when a man-o’-war could show no canvas whatsoever.

With this arrangement, Beaufort had gone far beyond the scale he had copied from Dalrymple four years earlier, assessing the wind against a well-known standard in much the same way as a standard unit might be used to determine an object’s length. Its great functional advantage was that it measured the force of the wind, and not its speed; at that time it was impossible to measure wind speed at sea with any accuracy, but using the concept of force, all trained observers could arrive at the same number on the scale merely by glancing at the sails and gauging the performance of their vessel.

By 1834, Captain Beaufort was Hydrographer to the Navy, and was able to instruct all his surveyors to use the scale he had devised. Four years later it was adopted for general use throughout the British Navy, and by the time he died in 1857, Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort’s Scale of Wind Force was used by mariners in every corner of the world.

Weatherpeople often trouble themselves about things of little concern to ordinary mortals. A few years ago, for example, a topic of the hour was whether on the previous day a certain individual had ‘forecasted’ the weather, or merely ‘forecast’ it. Naturally enough, recourse was had to Henry Watson Fowler’s Modern English Usage, a vade mecum no decent weather office is without.

‘Whether we are to say forecast or forecasted in the past tense and participle’, says Henry Watson, ‘depends on whether we regard the verb or the noun as the original from which the other is formed; if the verb is original (meaning to guess beforehand) the past and present participle will be cast . . .; if the verb is derived (meaning to make a forecast) they will as certainly be forecasted. The verb is in fact recorded 150 years earlier than the noun, and so we may therefore thankfully rid ourselves of the ugly forecasted; it may be hoped that we should do so even if history were against us, but this time it is kind.’

The basis for Fowler’s conclusion, however, becomes fuzzier when other sources are consulted. The Oxford Dictionary, I am told, informs us with remarkable precision that the word forecast has been in use with the special meaning of weather prediction since the year 1673. The Meteorological Glossary, on the other hand, says that in 1860 Admiral FitzRoy ‘invented the special meaning of the term forecast to avoid the somewhat unfortunate connotations attaching to such terms as prognostic and prophecy’.

Some people, of course, regard such activity as nonsense anyway. ‘Of all the silly, irritating foolishness by which we are plagued,’ declares Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat, ‘this weather forecasting fraud is about the most aggravating [sic]. It forecasts precisely what happened yesterday or the day before, and precisely the opposite of what is going to happen today.’

There is no truth whatever in this grossly unjust, imputed methodology. A forecaster in doubt about tomorrow’s weather would never predict simply a repeat of what had been experienced yesterday; he would use the honourable ploy of ‘hedging’. David Lodge has its measure when he tells us in his novel Changing Places about a radio forecaster who ‘predicted every possible combination of temperatures over the next 24 hours without actually committing himself to anything specific, not even the existing temperature’.

An example of hedging might be this: ‘Scattered heavy showers or outbreaks of rain today, with long sunny spells in some places; light to moderate variable winds, locally fresh or strong; temperatures near average, with visibility moderate to good, but poor locally in haze or fog. Outlook: little change.’ As a technique it owes more to James Joyce than Jerome K. Jerome: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles’, gloated the former about Ulysses, ‘that it will keep the professors busy for centuries over what I meant.’

Persons with an urge to celebrate often attach little triangles of cloth or plastic in a variety of different colours to a length of string, and then display their handiwork as a sign of their euphoria. They call it bunting. But if you look up the word in almost any dictionary you will find it labelled ‘etym. unknown’, meaning that no one knows exactly where it came from.

Strangely enough, if you consult instead a German dictionary, you will find that bunt means ‘many-coloured’, ‘variegated’, ‘motley’, even ‘gay’. Every Easter, for example, the Germans like to paint their breakfast eggs in a wide variety of different colours, and call them bunte Eier. It all lends credence, I suppose, to Antoine de Rivarol’s famous epigram: Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français—‘What is not clear is not French.’ Indeed! It may be German.

Meteorologists, whether or not in celebratory mood, like to display bunting on their weather maps. If you look at their portrayal of a typical depression, you will notice, trailing southwards from the centre, two bold curved lines tastefully adorned with little pennants, just like bunting; these are fronts. Leading the way is the warm front, with red semi-circular markings; the cold front, with blue pointed barbs, trails behind to form the western boundary of a triangular zone between the two, its apex pointing towards the centre of the low. This area between the fronts is called the ‘warm sector’, in which the air is usually warmer and more humid than elsewhere.

As a low moves eastwards, its fronts are carried with it and swept anti-clockwise around its centre by the spiralling winds. Both warm and cold fronts may be thought of as elongated zones of rain moving steadily across the surface of the globe from west to east, but each has its own generic character.

The rain associated with a warm front sets in gradually, its approach being signalled first by ‘mares’ tails’, and then by a gradually thickening veil of cirrus cloud. As time goes by the blanket of cloud becomes thicker and lower until at first gentle, and then steadier, rain begins to fall. But when the warm front has passed a particular spot, there is seldom a dramatic change; there follows rather a gradual transition to damp, cloudy, drizzly weather which lasts until the arrival of the second front.

A cold front is more vigorous. Its arrival is often marked by a relatively quick transition from the drizzly warm sector conditions to very heavy, perhaps thundery, rain. Now comes the heaviest downpour of the rainy interlude, but its end is sudden. While the rain still falls, a patch of blue may appear somewhere in the western sky; the rain stops, the Sun breaks through, and the wet glistening countryside takes on a new look of brightness and of life. The cold front has passed by.

Few individuals are sufficiently talented in their chosen field for their name to be remembered centuries later. It is even more exceptional to achieve lasting fame in a number of diverse disciplines, but such a man was Benjamin Franklin—statesman, writer, inventor and, in no small measure, meteorologist.

A printer by trade, Franklin was born in Boston 300 years ago today, on 17 January 1706. He became sufficiently prosperous early in life to be able to devote much of his time to scientific studies and to public service. This financial security was attributable to the phenomenal success of Poor Richard’s Almanac which Franklin published in Philadelphia for many years and into which, along with all the data usually found in almanacs, he put many of his own ideas and proverbs.

During the 1740s Franklin became interested in the phenomenon of electricity, a subject then very much in vogue, and was convinced that the lightning flashes associated with a thunderstorm were electrical in origin. In 1753 he carried out his famous experiment with a kite to demonstrate, dangerously but conclusively, that this indeed was so, and it was but a small step from this knowledge to the development of ‘Franklin rods’, or lightning conductors as we call them nowadays, to protect tall structures from a lightning strike.

	THE END OF A REVOLUTIONARY IDEAL
	2 January 2006

	SKIES OF BLUE—AND BLACK AND WHITE
	4 January 2006

	THE PREVIEW OF 2006 IS NOW COMPLETE
	5 January 2006

	LIVING IN FEAR OF THE WHITE DEATH
	6 January 2006