Two hundred years ago measurements could be recorded as much as pleased the recorder, for he was an amateur. John Dalton, then a young schoolmaster in Kendal in the north of England, began keeping daily meteorological records in 1787. As Partington remarks, the Cumberland town provided "ample opportunities for studying rainfall".(1)  With limited means Dalton constructed his own rain-gauges, barometers, thermometers and hygrometers. In 1793, Dalton published tables of rainfall, barometric pressure, temperature, wind and humidity in his Meteorological Observations. This was hardly the end of the matter. He continued to record his observations until the morning of the day he died in 1844: "little rain this day".(2)   Dalton’s daily devotion to meteorology lasted 57 years.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, meteorological phenomena were little understood. Not much information was available, and deriving patterns and theories from scattered data about large-scale phenomena was an uncertain business. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1830, included meteorology among the sciences which it intended to advance. The leading figures in the Association were quick to recognise the need for the standardisation of instruments and for theoretical frameworks to guide the gathering of data. The foot soldiers of science whom they recruited were not so sensitive to the larger issues.

The case of William Snow Harris shows how zealous industry could get out of hand. Harris responded to the Association’s call in 1831 for hourly thermometric observations to be taken in southwest England. Exercising his diligence at Plymouth Dockyard, Harris began to accumulate data. At the 1835 Meeting of the Association he reported that he had recorded and reduced 26,000 temperature observations for the previous two years. At the next year’s meeting he received financial support and began to keep pressure and humidity records. By 1838 he could reflect with satisfaction on the 70,000 thermometric observations of the previous five years. And still the data mounted. Where was it all leading? At the 1839 Meeting Harris sought to have his 120,000 observations printed so that others could analyse his data. But after several years no funds were forthcoming to publish the huge quantity of data. As Morrell and Thackray comment: "These observations proved an expensive venture in inductive science, in which data were gathered on a colossal scale, reduced, tabulated, and the mean results exhibited by graphs. The work certainly revealed the daily and annual changes in certain meteorological features, but it gave no purchase on or stimulus to theory."(3)

Digesting a large accumulation of data was a trying task, even where a much smaller set of data was concerned than Harris’s ample gathering. As John Scott Russell complained in 1838: "Besides the labour of the original observations themselves, I have been nearly three hours a day for the last four months employed in classing and discussing them and arranging the results ... I get up at six o’clock in the morning and work at your report till nine and shall continue to do so until it is finished; but it will be some time before I again undertake the discussion of 30,000 observations."(4)

Grand schemes for gathering data about physical phenomena spread far and wide in the early decades of the nineteenth century, and Australia played some part in these. About the time that Harris was beginning his meteorological observations an international program of geomagnetic research was also getting underway. Promoted by Carl Gauss and Alexander von Humboldt, the Magnetische Verein (Magnetic Union) involved the establishment of magnetic observatories in many parts of the world. British scientists participated in the scheme, resulting in observatories at Toronto, St Helena, Cape Town and Hobart Town. The Hobart observatory was set up by James Clark Ross in 1840 during the course of his Antarctic voyage.

Rossbank Observatory, as it came to be known after its founder, was equipped with a range of magnetic and meteorological instruments. All the observatories operated on Göttingen Time so that their results could be correlated. The three magnetometers - for vertical and horizontal force and declination - were to be read hourly except on specially designated days known as ‘term days’. On these term days, which occurred once a month, the instruments were to be read at five or ten minute intervals, necessitating a measurement every two and a half minutes. To achieve these 576 observations in the course of 24 hours, the Director of the Observatory, Lieutenant Joseph Kay, and his two assistants were supported by a team of volunteers including the Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Sir John Franklin. The only relief from the relentless schedule of observations came on Sundays.

Britain’s Royal Navy contributed much to scientific discovery in the nineteenth century, not least in the vicinity of Australia. Writing in March 1842 to Professor Humphrey Lloyd at Trinity College Dublin who was closely involved in the project, Kay expressed the stamina of naval officers for such demanding pursuits:

"I can exultantly state that 18 months has already transpired and I do not feel my zeal in the least abated; on the contrary, the more I become conversant with the subject, the more does my good intention increase. In that I will not yield to either Civilian or Soldier - I must beg to inform you that Naval men are accustomed from an early age to habits of great regularity and self-restraint and perhaps our present task sits lighter upon us in consequence than it would have done upon young men, who all their lives have been seeking pleasure rather than useful employment. To say that it is not highly monotonous to a degree, would be untrue, but I assure you my dear Mr. Lloyd that I trust myself and my assistants are stimulated by a far higher motive than the pursuit of indolent ease or the idea of merely doing what one is obliged to do ..."(5)

The intellectual isolation, the lack of professional advancement and the monotony of routine eventually began to tell on Kay. He reported to Ross in December 1847 that while the work of the observatory "proceeds with the greatest regularity ... I cannot conceal from you that beginning with myself all are tired and weary of the continued and unvarying routine day and night, without any cessation. I have now completed 7½ years of observatory work with hourly observations and am become very much of a machine wound up to go to Gottingen mean time ... the monotony of the pursuit has at last conquered my determination not to express or allow that I felt fatigue and it has fairly beaten me."(6)

The demanding schedule was reduced and Kay stayed on until 1853. Rossbank Observatory continued to operate until it was closed down at the end of 1854. As the magnetic observatory closest to the South Magnetic Pole, Rossbank made a significant contribution to understanding global magnetic phenomena. Its results mirrored those at Toronto, similarly situated near the North Magnetic Pole.

In reflecting on the pursuit of scientific understanding in the nineteenth century we can see that at times the gathering of data became very nearly an end in itself. Other tedious and exacting work made a fundamental contribution to knowledge. With insight and imagination the pursuit of knowledge could on occasion have remarkable consequences. John Dalton’s interest in atmospheric conditions led him to consider vapour pressure and the mixing of different gases. This in turn led him to develop the chemical atomic theory, one of the foundations of modern chemistry.(7)

Notes

(3)  Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (Oxford, 1981), p. 522

(4)  Morrell and Thackray, p. 275

(7)  Arnold Thackray, John Dalton: Critical Assessments of His Life and Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), Ch. 5