The Year Without Summer by William K. Klingaman, Nicholas P. Klingaman Page A

subject,
     for any great length or time.” Hence the Advertiser urged that regular journals of weather observations should be kept throughout the
     nation. “A great mass of useful information might be collected concerning our climate,
     and seasons,” the editorial concluded, “if gentlemen who possess the necessary instruments,
     would be careful to devote a few minutes in each day to mark the state of the weather,
     and the temperature of the atmosphere.” Even a modest effort on the part of these
     individuals, the Advertiser predicted, would provide data which “would be of great and lasting importance.”
    A number of Americans (besides Jefferson, of course) already had made sporadic attempts
     to collect weather statistics in a systematic fashion, although a lack of uniformity
     in instrumentation and methodology limited the usefulness of their data. In the 1740s,
     Dr. John Lining—a Scottish-born physician living in Charleston, South Carolina—began
     tracking changes in the weather with variations in his own physical processes, to
     try to determine the relationship between climate and public health. “I began these
     experiments,” Lining wrote, “[to] discover the influence of our different seasons
     upon the human body by which I might arrive at some certain knowledge of the cause
     of our epidemic diseases which regularly return at their stated seasons as a good
     clock strikes twelve when the sun is on the meridian.” Several other physicians in
     the United States maintained their own records comparing weather and public health
     data in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but there was little coordination
     of their efforts.
    In 1778, Jefferson succeeded in compiling parallel weather observations between Monticello
     and the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, courtesy of the president
     of the college, who agreed to take daily readings of the temperature, winds, and barometric
     pressure. The effort lasted for only six weeks, however. Although Jefferson persistently
     encouraged the establishment of a national system of meteorological observation throughout
     the last decades of his life, the best he could achieve was an occasional exchange
     of information with like-minded souls in cities from Quebec and Philadelphia to Natchez
     and London. The closest the nation came to achieving a coordinated program of weather
     measurements before 1816 was the thrice-daily observation system established by the
     consortium of New England colleges—notably Middlebury, Williams, Yale, and sometimes
     Harvard—of which Chester Dewey was a member.
    Such an accumulation of concrete statistical details was precisely the sort of empirical
     scientific task that appealed to Americans in the early nineteenth century. As Gordon
     Wood has pointed out, Americans were forsaking the Enlightenment’s fascination with
     metaphysical principles and abstract generalities in favor of a harder-edged and utilitarian
     approach to science. By 1816, science in the United States no longer was the preserve
     of gentlemen with sufficient leisure to contemplate the moral grandeur of natural
     laws, or pursue knowledge purely for its own sake. Anyone could gather data (assuming
     one was armed with the proper measuring instruments), or make sense out of statistics
     accumulated by others. When introducing his Picture of Philadelphia , a detail-laden snapshot of the city published in 1811, physician James Mease declared
     that “the chief object ought to be the multiplication of facts, and the reflections
     arising out of them ought to be left to the reader.” Americans increasingly believed
     that these collections of scientific data should serve a useful purpose; the study
     of chemistry, for instance, should produce better cider, cheese, or methods for marinating
     meat. Perhaps the compilation of meteorological data might result in more efficient
     agricultural practices. And if scientific