Charles Fitzhugh Talman

“ The weather also affects the buying moods of people. A dark, dreary day in summer seems to influence humans to take on the same cast as the atmosphere. They are grouchy and hard to please. On the other hand, a cold day in winter has the opposite effect. The warmth and cheer of the store is such a pleasant contrast to the out-of-doors that shoppers like to linger over the wares and indulge themselves more readily in the luxury of buying. ”

“ The physiological effects of flight and altitude have added a new chapter to the science of medicine. Seasickness has been the crux of the ship’s doctor; will “air sickness” prove equally baffling? What are the therapeutic possibilities of flying? Will physicians advise their patients to seek a “change of air” vertically instead of horizontally?
The atmosphere, once monopolized by the birds, has become the abode of man. That is one excellent reason why everybody should acquire a knowledge of meteorology—the science of the air. ”

“ Air and water together contain, in their oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, all the major constituents of our foods in unlimited abundance. It is tantalizing to think of the slow and roundabout way in which these things are wrought into edible shape—and the prices we have to pay for them. No less tantalizing, when coal is scarce and costly, is the thought that every vagrant breeze is laden with the carbon dioxide from which the chemistry of living plants so readily extracts the chief element of fuels. ”

“ The specter of an invisible monster entering our homes surreptitiously from our plumbing pipes and sapping our lives and the lives of our children must be laid aside; we need no longer leave saucers of so-called ‘chlorides’ standing about our floors to neutralize in an impossible manner mysterious effluvia that do not exist; and when we return to our town houses in the autumn we may enter them with no fears that we are risking our lives by coming into a toxic, germ-infected, sewer gas-laden, deadly atmosphere. ”

“ His first indication that something is wrong is, as a rule, either an increase or a decrease of speed that is not counteracted by the accustomed movements of the controls. A period of wild suspense and utter bewilderment now follows, during which the pilot makes violent efforts to recover control, but without success. The next thing that he realizes, if he realizes anything at all, is that he is either on his back or spinning, and the next thing he knows is that he is out of the clouds with the earth standing up at a ridiculous angle and spinning round like a drunken dinner plate. ”

“ The promptness with which a piece of stale bread becomes moldy in a damp atmosphere is one of many proofs of the omnipresence in the atmosphere of the microscopic spores of fungi, ready to propagate their species with amazing rapidity as soon as they light upon a suitable nutrient medium. Last, but not least, bacteria, the most minute of all known organisms—so small that thousands or millions of them clustered together would make a mass not larger than the head of a pin—swarm in the air, as they do in water, the soil, and the bodies of animals. ”

“ In contrast to the uncertainty that still prevails in the scientific world on the subject of climatic changes is the confidence with which the average layman may be heard to assert that such changes have taken place within his own recollection. The popular idea that climate has changed perceptibly within a single human lifetime is a world-wide delusion, and one that has, apparently, always flourished. In the United States we hear of the “old-fashioned winter,” with its unlimited sleighing, and also of a marked increase or falling off in the rainfall in certain districts. ”

“ Few people realize the multiplicity and complexity of climates. It is a common occurrence for a prospective traveler or a business man to write to a meteorological establishment requesting, for example, a description of the climate of South America. Of course, no such thing exists. A continent does not have a climate, but a multitude of climates. Even to set forth, in general terms, the more important types of climate that prevail between Cape Horn and Panama is no small undertaking. Moreover, general descriptions often fail to supply the needs of those who make inquiries about climate. ”

“ When an inclosed body of air or other gas is subjected to pressure, its volume is diminished and its density is increased. It is natural to inquire what will happen if the external pressure be increased indefinitely. Will the inclosed substance eventually cease to be gaseous and become a solid or a liquid? The answer to this question, furnished about half a century ago through the researches of Thomas Andrews, is that no amount of pressure will liquefy a gas unless its temperature is below a certain point. ”

“ The layman usually thinks of a wind as a nearly steady horizontal flow of air. Such winds exist, but they are exceptional, especially in the lower levels of the atmosphere. A wind is generally full of gusts and eddies, upcurrents and downcurrents, and it is these eccentricities that gradually develop in the aviator a sort of sixth sense—a “feel” for atmospheric fluctuations, that enables him to adjust his machine instinctively to the forces tending to disturb its equilibrium. He also learns by experience the conditions under which irregularities of a pronounced character may be expected. ”

“ The whole sky may be filled with the shifting streamers, along which travel rapid pulsations of light, so that the phenomenon then suggests strongly what it really is—a vast electrical discharge passing down through the atmosphere from outer space. When the observer is thus surrounded by the beams, they seem, on account of perspective, to converge toward a point south of the zenith, where they form a beautiful corona or crown. ”

“ As was once pointed out by the late Professor Simon Newcomb, the effect of a violent explosion upon a body of moist air a quarter of a mile distant is about the same as that which the clapping of one’s hands would produce upon the moist air of the room in which the experiment is performed. Again, if we stand in the steam escaping from a teakettle and clap our hands we shall not produce a shower, though we jostle the water drops much more than the explosion does at a distance of a quarter of a mile. ”

“ With respect to wind there is an important difference between aircraft and marine craft. Mere strength of wind is not dangerous to an aeroplane, except when starting or landing. An aviator flying above the clouds, with no landmarks in sight by which to gauge his movements, is no more conscious of the actual wind at that level, provided it is steady, than he is of the rotation of the earth on its axis. He feels the wind produced by the motion of his machine through the air—the so-called “relative wind”—but no other. The true wind may be a mere zephyr, or a hurricane blowing 150 miles an hour ”

“ The more expert and accomplished the meteorologist, the more certain he is that all he can do without the materials for constructing a map, though he may have a barometer and other instruments at hand, is to make a guess at what the map is like and think out from that what the weather changes are likely to be. It is a common experience of professional meteorologists away from their base to find themselves appealed to for an opinion about the weather, judging from the signs of the sky alone, because they are learned in such things. ”

“ MEDICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL METEOROLOGY The starting point in any study of the physiological effects of weather and climate upon humanity is the remarkable fact that, on the hottest days of summer and the coldest of winter, in tropical deserts and amid polar snows, the temperature within the body of a healthy man remains constant to a fraction of a degree. ”

“ It is inconceivable that man, who is every day achieving new miracles in the conquest of nature, should not eventually find a way of regulating the rainfall and sunshine that are of such vital importance to his crops, the winds that must be reckoned with in his voyages by sea and air, and the various other elements of weather that have so much to do with his happiness and welfare. ”

“ A snow crystal is so fragile that it is easily mutilated by the wind and by contact with other crystals. In very calm weather and at the beginning of a snowstorm many single and perfect crystals are wafted gently to the ground, and their beauty is revealed when they fall on dark objects, especially if they are examined with a magnifying glass. In spite of their immense variety in detail, all perfect snow crystals and other ice crystals have six sides or principal rays. ”

“ Again, the whole machine may suddenly enter an air current of quite different speed and direction from the one in which it has been flying. To take an extreme case, it may run into a stream of air flowing just as fast, and in the same direction, as the machine itself, with the result that the relative wind becomes zero, and the machine, deprived of all lift, drops like a stone until it acquires a velocity with respect to its new environment. ”

“ A generation or so ago physicists were content to say that aqueous vapor turns to drops of water in the air merely on account of being cooled. The question of how the drops get their start, or why the moisture forms drops at all, does not seem to have troubled them.
One way in which air or any other gas is cooled is by expanding against pressure. Some of the energy in the gas, originally manifesting itself as heat, is applied to the work of expansion, and thus ceases to be heat. Hence the temperature of the gas falls. ”

“ DUST AND SMOKE IN THE ATMOSPHERE When the moralist reminds us that we are children of the dust and predestined to a dusty end, there is a grain of comfort in the discovery that modern science regards dust as one of the most important things in the whole economy of nature. ”

“ After noon, when the sun is highest, the supply of solar heat diminishes, but it is still greater, for a time, than the heat loss from the earth, and for this reason the temperature, as a rule, keeps on rising until some time toward the middle of the afternoon, when the maximum temperature of the day occurs.
Humidity is an element of weather that is more often talked about than understood. Atmospheric humidity is the state of the atmosphere with respect to the amount of moisture it contains in a gaseous form, not in the form of a liquid. ”

“ Above all, the energy developed in any discharge of explosives that the community could afford to pay for would be quite insignificant compared with that which prodigal nature supplies to the tornado.
The same disproportion between the giant forces at work in the atmosphere and the pygmy forces at the disposal of mankind is a point that is overlooked in most attempts at weather-making. ”

“ Another effect of wind transportation is the mixing of soils. There is a constant interchange of soil material between different regions, so that the composition of the soil on a particular farm, for instance, is not the same now that it was a few years ago or that it will be a few years hence. Lastly, the presence of dust in the atmosphere, whether derived from the soil or otherwise, has various interesting and important effects upon the heat and light we receive from the sun and modifies, in numerous ways, the conditions of human life upon our planet. ”

“ The widespread belief that rain can be produced by explosions rises so far above the level of ordinary popular delusions that it has sometimes led to large expenditures of money on the part of drought-ridden communities and even of national governments. Perhaps the most remarkable example of official confidence in the efficacy of this process was that furnished some years ago by the Volksraad, or legislative assembly, of the Transvaal, which passed a law forbidding the bombardment of the clouds to produce rain, on the ground that the rain-makers were thwarting the will of the Almighty! ”

“ All kinds of dust are heavier than air, and, contrary to popular belief, never truly “float” in the atmosphere. Dust may enter the atmosphere at high levels, through the disintegration of meteors, or it may be spouted up by volcanoes, but dust blown up from the earth’s surface rises only because the air is rising with it; and, in still air, all dust sinks more or less rapidly toward the ground. The rate of its fall depends upon its specific gravity, and upon the size and shape of the dust particles. Other things being equal, the finest particles fall most slowly. ”

“ All our forests and all our crops draw far more of their solid substance from the air than from the soil. Fuel and water are valuable sources of power, but so is the moving air that drives sailing ships and windmills, and the atmospheric pressure that helps to operate suction pumps. It is the moisture of the air that feeds our streams and, directly or indirectly, waters all plants that grow upon the land. Lastly, it is the atmospheric25 oxygen that we breathe that keeps us from very speedily becoming incapable of using any of the other resources of Nature. ”

“ The circulation of the air in a desert is generally much more active than that of the air in a building with the windows shut, and therefore much more conducive to rapid evaporation. There are systems of ventilation in which the air is kept in steady and rapid motion, and it is probably only in such cases that the air of our heated houses can be compared to that of a desert. From the European point of view American buildings are notoriously overheated, but this is probably due to the fact that our hot summers—much hotter than those of Europe—have adapted us to a tropical climate. ”

“ THE ANATOMY OF THE ATMOSPHERE Two quite different conceptions of the substance called “air” are current in the world. One has prevailed from time immemorial. The other is wholly modern. One is the popular view, the other the scientific. ”

“ The climate of a city is, through causes dependent upon man, materially different from the natural climate of the surrounding country. Every dwelling provided with heating arrangements enjoys an artificial summer amid the blasts of winter. Local control of the winds is exemplified in the planting of thousands of miles of trees as windbreaks in the prairie regions of our Middle West. By moderating the winds this process has a marked effect on temperature and evaporation and is so beneficial to crops that in the aggregate it furnishes a striking example of successful “weather-making” by mankind. ”