In 1803, a shy British pharmacist wrote a pamphlet that made him a reluctant celebrity. The reason? He proposed a revolutionary new system for classifying clouds — with Latin names we still use today, like cumulus, cirrus, and stratus. Also: when...
Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modifications of Clouds gave English writers and artists a new Latin vocabulary for classifying clouds, and its influence reached John Constable and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s poem The Cloud turns a cloud into an “I”...