The winds of change

The brainchild of William Henry Dines is almost obsolete

The brainchild of William Henry Dines is almost obsolete. It was born back in the 1890s after a number of well-publicised weather disasters highlighted the need for accurate measurements of wind speed.

Dines was given the job of designing an instrument to do the job, and he did it so well that what came to be known as "Dines pressure tube anemometer" was the standard implement for this purpose for over three-quarters of a century.

Dines was born into a prosperous English family in 1855. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1881, and after a short spell as a teacher, devoted most of the rest of his life to meteorology.

His ingenious anemometer consists of an open tube kept facing into the wind by a wind vane; variations in the strength of the wind cause changes in the air pressure at the opening, and these variations are pneumatically transmitted down the tube and applied to a float which bobs up and down in a container filled with water.

READ MORE

The movements of the float, which can be harnessed to a pen, correspond to instantaneous increases and decreases in the speed of the wind.

Dines's instrument has always been regarded as the most accurate means of measuring wind speed. In recent years, however, the need to harness the output of such instruments to electronic gadgetry has led to the "rotating-cup" anemometer - the familiar horizontal whirling windmill - enjoying a resurgence of popularity, because it is easier to adapt in this respect.

Few Dines anemometers remain in use, and those that do are unlikely to survive for long.

With the turn of the century, Dines went on to face the challenge of obtaining meteorological readings of conditions in the upper atmosphere, and in 1904 he designed a cheap and simple meteoro- graph - an instrument for the automatic recording of upper-air temperature, pressure and humidity.

He and his family spent a number of exciting summers on the west coast of Scotland, sending these new instruments aloft on massive kites, and in doing so obtained valuable information about the vertical structure of the atmosphere. By 1915, he had yet another new interest: this time he produced the Dines Tilting-Siphon Rain Recorder - a clever device, still in use, for the continuous measurement of rainfall.

Dines's son, L.H.G. Dines, came to Ireland in 1915 as Superintendent of Valentia Observatory in Co Kerry and stayed until 1922, later becoming a respected and prolific writer on meteorological matters, until his death in 1965. William Henry Dines himself, however, died 70 years ago tomorrow, on Christmas Eve in 1927.