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Safety networks: fishery barometers and the outsourcing of judgement at the early Meteorological Department

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 July 2008

SARAH DRY
SARAH DRY
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, East Sussex, BN1 9SH, UK. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

In 1854 Admiral FitzRoy, acting as the first head of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, initiated a project to distribute fishery barometers to poor fishing communities. Over the next eleven years until his untimely death in 1865, FitzRoy oversaw the distribution of dozens of barometers. The distribution continued after his death and many of the original barometers are still in place. FitzRoy's tenure at the Met Department is today remembered for his innovative and controversial development of weather forecasts, the first of their kind in Britain, which were telegraphed to coastal towns to warn of impending storms. Against the backdrop of this dramatic attempt to predict the weather using the tools of telegraphy and synoptic mapping, the barometer distribution project looks like an unexceptional piece of administration, a routine shuttling of correspondence and instruments. Closer inspection reveals a case study in Victorian governance that shows how individuals could contribute to elite forms of science by remaining independent of them in key respects. Rather than providing disciplined and trustworthy registrations of nature's language, the fishery barometers distributed by FitzRoy and the Met Department were explicitly excluded from the wider project to map British and global weather. By being thus excluded, they helped augment the autonomy of their intended users, the poor fishermen who were thereby made into better, more independent, interpreters of the Met Office forecasts. By revealing the potential for an instrument to be useful when not registering, this episode suggests that instruments could augment as well as replace the autonomous judgements of individuals.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , March 2009 , pp. 35 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 British Society for the History of Science

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References

1 Parliament sanctioned a vote of £3,200 to the Board of Trade and £1,000 for the Admiralty to establish a ‘uniform system of meteorological observations at sea’ in order to help determine the ‘very best tracks for ships to follow in order to make the quickest as well as safest passages’. Letter from James Booth, Committee of Privy Council for Trade, September 1854, in ‘Report of the Met Department for 1857’, Parliamentary Papers (henceforth PP) 1857 XX, 283–372. These annual grants would remain unchanged for the first five years of the office.

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3 Royal Society letter from Earl of Rosse, 19 June 1854, PRO BJ 7/4 iv.

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29 Walker to Farrer, 2 June 1858, PRO BJ 7/644.

30 Primrose to FitzRoy, 19 July 1858, PRO BJ 7/645.

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