Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century by Frederik Nebeker

Abstract

786 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Such differences have significant ramifications, but a fuller expla­ nation would require more in-depth descriptions and comparative analysis ofwartime labor relations and the complex misconnections between class and feminist politics. Such a project would inevitably deflect from the rigor and clarity of the author’s main theoretical argument. Thus, in the end, one wonders why this is a comparative study when analysis of one national industry could convey the au­ thor’s main points as effectively. Downs offers us a superb study of why gender is crucial to production and to political economy. The social order of the rationalized factory is built on gender hierarchy. The language of sexual difference provides the conceptual frame­ work through which labor as abstract potential is cut, shaped, co­ erced, and trained to become concrete and specific workers. Unfor­ tunately for 20th-century labor history, women workers and female supervisors have marked the leading edge of modernizing trends that de-skill labor and extend entrepreneurial prerogatives. Downs aptly remarks: “if the wartime experience had linked women contin­ gentlywith the new technologies, employers then cemented this con­ nection more durably by enshrining it in the language ofjob skill” (p. 2). Thus, although the war overturned a traditional notion of male and femalejobs by bringing women into previously male domi­ nated industries, the new technical division of labor was conceived from its inception as a hierarchical sexual division of labor. Tessie P. Liu Dr. Liu teaches in the history department at Northwestern University. Calculating the Weather: Meteorology in the 20th Century. By Frederik Nebeker. San Diego: Academic Press, 1995. Pp. vii+ 251; figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $64.95 (hardcover). This book surveys the progress ofnumerical methods in meteorol­ ogy over the course of the 20th century. Rather than tracing a linear advance, however, the author establishes an analytical framework ac­ cording to which numerical techniques unified disparate branches of meteorology. As the century opened, meteorology included three distinct traditions: climatology, a largely empirical science; dynamic meteorology, which studied the physics of the atmosphere; and syn­ optic meteorology, which employed daily weather maps for weather forecasting. Forecasting was particularly isolated from the other two disciplines, relying as it did primarily on the experience and intu­ ition offorecasters rather than on theoretical results. Numerical cal­ culation played only minor roles in all three areas, though forecast­ ers did make use of such devices as slide rules and graphical aids. Two early-20th-century meteorologists attempted to compute the weather. Vilhelm Bjerknes, founder ofthe famous Norwegian school TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 787 of meteorology, entered the field intending to calculate solutions to the equations ofmotion ofthe atmosphere, thereby uniting dynamic meteorology and forecasting. He soon knew that his project could be realized only in the distant future, and the methods of air-mass analysis he developed followed a different path. Lewis Fry Richard­ son, having invented a method for numerical solution of differential equations, decided to try it out on meteorology. It took him six weeks to compute inaccurate and partial predictions for a six-hour time interval. His experience dissuaded meteorologists from attempting to calculate forecasts for a good while. Nevertheless, the growing quantities of observations, the applica­ tion of statistical techniques to them, and the growing numbers of calculations required in different branches of meteorology led in the interwar period to increasing reliance on computational devices such as punched card machines. Nebeker offers interesting insights into the further push towards calculation effected by the Second World War. The large numbers of meteorologists required for war operations and the urgency of their training, for example, led to the presentation of the subject in workbooks and textbooks as a series of algorithms suitable for rapid learning and calculation. The need for agreement among forecasters working with different military units involved in joint operations stimulated interest in methods of objective forecasting that would generate results independent of the subjective judgment of individuals. Meteorology’s wartime impor­ tance also secured a significant and permanent increase in govern­ ment funding. As had Richardson,John von Neumann found in meteorology an opportunity to advance methods of numerical analysis he had devel­ oped independently. Meteorological...