Lewis Fry Richardson was born in 1881 into a well-known Quaker family of the north of England. As his middle name suggests, he was distantly related to certain successful manufacturers of chocolate, and his nephew, Sir Ralph Richardson, became one of the foremost actors his time. But of Lewis Fry Richardson himself few have ever heard, and he grew up to be the epitome of the nutty professor of the story books.
One of Richardson's best known scientific papers, for example, unforgettably begins: "We have observed the relative motion of a pair of parsnips . . . " Another examines the analogy between sparks and mental images, in an attempt to explain the phenomen on of sudden thoughts. And shortly after the Titanic sank, Richardson was observed with his wife blowing a penny whistle in a rowing boat; he was using an umbrella both as an amplifier and a receiver to gauge the strength of the sound reflected from the nearby cliffs, thus anticipating the apparatus that we now call sonar.
One of Richardson's more far-fetched notions, however, was that a weather forecast could be produced by calculation. His idea was that the future pressure pattern could be calculated if the present state of the atmosphere was accurately known. The theory seemed plausible, but it involved an inordinate amount of calculation.
None the less, Richardson tried out his methodology. During the first World War he found himself in 1917 serving as an ambulance driver in the Champagne district of France. For much of his time there he worked near the front line, and it was in these extraordinary conditions that he carried out one of the most remarkable calculational feats ever accomplished. As he put it himself: "My office was a heap of hay in a cold rest billet." He used as his starting point the weather observations for 7 a.m. on May 20th, 1910 - 90 years ago today - and over several months he painstakingly worked through the calculations to produce a six-hour forecast.
He published his results in 1922 in a book called Weather Prediction by Numerical Process that has become one of the classics of meteorology. But they were disappointing; Richardson's forecast predicted pressure changes of up to 150 hectopascals in the six-hour period, a totally unrealistic figure. As it turned out, however, Richardson was merely a prophet born before his time. The arrival of the electronic computer in the early 1950s changed the scene dramatically. Richardson's methods were vindicated, his methodology improved, and "numerical weather prediction", as we call it now, became reality.
It has led to the great increase in the accuracy of weather forecasts we have experienced in recent years.