Howard, Luke (1772-1864)

Howard, Luke (1772-1864)

English pharmacist and meteorologist

Luke Howard classified and named cloud formations. He understood that even though clouds have a countless variety of shapes, they have only three basic forms, which he termed cirrus (hair curl), cumulus (heap), and stratus (layer). There can be combinations of any of these three, such as cumulostratus or cirrocumulus. Any of them can also be a "nimbus" (rain) cloud, such as cumulonimbus. High clouds are designated by the prefix "alto-," such as altostratus.

Howard was born in London, England, on November 28, 1772, the eldest son of a prosperous businessman, Robert Howard, and his wife Elizabeth, née Leatham. As devout Quakers, the family enrolled Luke in a prominent Quaker institution, Thomas Huntly's School in Burford, near Oxford, from 1780 to 1787. That was the extent of his formal education. Although not trained as a scientist, he learned enough chemistry and pharmacy on his own to become a successful manufacturer, wholesaler, and retailer of pharmaceutical preparations. He began his business in London in 1793, partnered with William Allen in London and Plaistow, Essex, from 1796 until Allen's death in 1803, moved the business to Stratford while continuing to live in Plaistow, and eventually became head of the firm Howards and Sons. Throughout his life he supported himself with this trade.

Howard was fully dedicated to four main concerns: his business, his religion, his family, and his hobby, meteorology . On December 7, 1796, he married Mariabella Eliot, who shared his amateur interest in meteorology, helped him to gather data, and encouraged him to disseminate his findings. From an early age he loved clouds, and would spend hours watching them or painting watercolors of them. Gradually his observations and experiments, mostly conducted at home in his garden, became more precise and systematic.

Before Howard's time there was no useful classification of clouds. They were described haphazardly in terms of their color, size, shape, density, persistence, altitude, and moisture content. The eighteenth-century enthusiasm for classifying everything imaginable had not succeeded with clouds, even though scientists as reputable as Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) had worked on the problem. Howard solved it with a simple threefold schema, which he presented in a famous lecture to the Askesian Society in London in 1802. This talk was published as "On the Modifications of Clouds" in 1803. Overnight Howard was a sensation. Within a decade, his classification was in general use throughout Western Europe . Not only scientists, but also poets such as Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) and painters such as Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) and John Constable (1776–1837) praised him for his meteorological breakthrough and its contribution to their professions.

Besides his work on clouds, Howard published articles and essays on pollen, atmospheric pressure , meteorological instrumentation, the seasons , precipitation , electricity , and evaporation , plus a three-volume book called The Climate of London, as well as anti-slavery pamphlets and several apologies for Quakerism. For his contributions to meteorology and climatology, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1821.

Howard moved from Plaistow to Tottenham, near London, in 1812 and to Ackworth, Yorkshire, in the mid-1820s. After Mariabella died in 1852, he moved in with his son, Robert, at Bruce Grove, Tottenham, where he died on March 21, 1864.

See also Clouds and cloud types; Meteorology