READERS of Weather Eye over the past few days will now be aware ad nauseam that Monday marked the sequicentenary of the discovery of Neptune. The credit for that achievement in September 1846 is shared by England's John Couch Adams and, the Frenchman, Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier. The former went on to live a long and honourable life, the high point of which, no doubt, was to receive an honorary LLD from Trinity College Dublin. But Leverrier, alas, became a meteorologist indeed he is the man whom many would regard as the father of organised meteorology in France.
Leverrier was born in Normandy in 1811, and became Professor of Astronomy at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris at the early age of 26. Eight years after his famous Neptunian achievement, on the morning of November 14th, 1854, there occurred a very severe storm at Balaclava, which caused the loss of 16 French ships at the very height of the Crimean War.
As it happened, the disaster did not influence the final outcome of the hostilities, but it was sufficiently serious a set back to merit a major investigation, a task which the Emperor, Napoleon III, entrusted to the now famous Jean Joseph Leverrier. His brief was to determine if there was any way in which the path of the great storm could have been foreseen, and the navy warned in time.
Leverrier contacted over 250 scientific institutions in the course of his detailed examination, and finally answered the question in the affirmative yes, given sufficient information it was possible to predict the weather. Six months later he presented the Emperor with a detailed plan to warn mariners of approaching storms, based on a "meteorological network" whose observations, he said, could now be exploited in a practical away following the recent invention of the electric telegraph. By June 1855 13 of these weather reporting stations had been established throughout France, and shortly afterwards, from the Paris Observatory of which Leverrier was now Director, the first storm warnings were issued.
Leverrier, it must be admitted, was not without his faults, and was not always popular with his scientific colleagues. In fact he was dismissed from his post at the Paris Observatory in 1870 for what was described as "irritability". He was reinstated, however, when his successor, Delauney, was drowned in a boating accident a few years later, and there he remained until his death on September 23rd, 1877. Jean Joseph Leverrier died on the 31st anniversary of his greatest forecast when Galle had found Neptune in the exact spot that Leverrier had said he would.