Whoosh! How wind changed the world
Simon Winchester has a genius for bringing recherché scientific-historical characters to life. In previous books he resurrected the 19th-century founders of the Oxford English Dictionary, the early geologist William “Strata” Smith and the great Sinologist/biochemist Joseph Needham. That he made bestsellers out of such left-field subjects says a lot about Winchester’s intelligence, infectious enthusiasm and sheer ability to spin a story.
This book is more of an ensemble piece: a miscellany of pioneers and eccentrics all gathered up and brought together, as it were, by the wind. There’s Rear Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, who devised the scale we all know, from light airs and moderate breezes to storm force 10. (He came up with the idea in 1806, apparently, while “spitting rivets” at enforced anchorage in Portsmouth.) Another of the better-known headliners is Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis, a “slender, clean-shaven and short-lived Parisian mathematician” who discovered in the 1830s how the Earth’s rotation makes currents and winds spin in opposite directions in the northern and southern hemispheres. Yes, we did the Coriolis effect at school.
But Winchester is more interested in obscurities and oddballs. He digs up Ralph Bagnold, who, in the 1930s, worked out how winds shape sand dunes, then led “a mad little group of quasi-military madmen blowing up fuel dumps” behind enemy lines in Libya in the Second World War. He also unearths Walter Munk, the Austrian-born expert on waves and swell who became famous as “the man who delayed D-Day” on account of a forecast of poor weather. (Although, as Winchester explains, it was only a day’s delay, and might have been a potentially disastrous two-week wait if Munk had not been able to predict the sea state on the Normandy beaches with confidence.)
Some of Winchester’s characters, you feel, make it into the book more because he is so diverted by the subject matter than because they are particularly important in the history of the wind. Take Léon Goossens, for instance, the celebrated oboist who delighted Londoners sheltering in the Tube in the Blitz. Winchester dwells for a good five pages on how reeds produce sound in a wind instrument. He is similarly delighted by Lyall Watson, the South African polymath who in the 1980s invented a biological wind scale that tried to describe different wind strengths in terms of how they affect the human body, from “eye discomfort from airborne matter” at force 3 to (supposedly) “arms are blown out from sides” at force 6.
This is all very entertaining but, after 350 pages, what starts off as capricious becomes meandering, and a breezy quality to the writing comes across more like windbaggery. What little there is on writers’ responses to the wind, for instance, is deposited in a late section that almost seems to be striving for word count. Daniel Defoe’s account of the Great Storm of 1703 and Joseph Conrad’s description of a typhoon are quoted at about a page’s length. Richard Hughes’s 1929 A High Wind in Jamaica gets a full two-page quotation.
Meanwhile, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, Shelley, Homer and Milton are all hastily namechecked in a single paragraph. And while criticising a book for what is not in it is a bit unfair, I cannot believe there’s no mention of Wordsworth’s greatest poem, The Prelude. I mean, the opening line is: “O there is blessing in this gentle breeze.” Come on.
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Most surprising, Winchester does not make much of the 400-odd world winds that have acquired such glorious names — and have such potent personalities. He has some thoughts on the Mistral and visits Trieste to sample the Bora. He lists the nine named winds in North America (the Duster, Diablo, Chinook, Santa Ana, Alberta Clipper, Pineapple Express, Nor’easter, Tehuantepecer and Barber), the five in Australia, plus a few more found elsewhere in the world, from the Sirocco and Harmattan to the more recondite Waryaraik of Argentina and Tebbad of Turkestan. But that’s about it, apart from the mean observation that, in Britain, “only one sad little gusty thing gets a name”: the Helm wind. (Winchester is British-born, but a long-term resident of the US.) They will be up in arms in the Pennines.
The author and journalist Simon Winchester
DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY IMAGES
More serious, the promised discussion of the future of the wind goes nowhere. Winchester makes some half-hearted references to climate change and the intensification of storms. He also throws in some talk of a possible “great stilling” of global winds, which seems to have been a theory in meteorology that was briefly fashionable but has fallen out of scientific favour. Unfortunately it has only half fallen out of the book.
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The real problem here, though, is that even the historical material fails to add up to anything. It’s fun to learn that the word “wind” used to rhyme with “grind”, and that the Stars and Stripes planted on the moon in 1969 was made to look wind-blown with the help of a 5ft horizontal gold-anodised aluminium tube, and that f***wind is a 16th-century word for a kestrel (“now happily obsolete”). But I put the book down with little sense of what wind means, either to Winchester or to humanity more generally. What a missed opportunity.
The Breath of the Gods: The History and Future of the Wind by Simon Winchester (William Collins £25 pp416). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members