by Lee Sandlin
2
A Little More of the Marvelous
One night in the summer of 1749, a waterspout appeared in the Mediterranean Sea just off the coast of Italy. This wasn’t an unprecedented event. Waterspouts had always been seen in the Mediterranean. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, mentioned the mysterious pillars of water that sometimes materialized out of nowhere in the open sea and overturned boats. But for the most part, these waterspouts were remote and vague apparitions—white writhing snakes that danced in the heat of a blue afternoon and vanished before anyone got too close. The 1749 waterspout was a pitch-black monster crowned with lightning that came roaring from the dark sea after midnight and crashed its way onshore.
Its landfall was in the port town of Ostia. It swept through the ancient clutter of stone docks and warehouses that swarmed the harbor and then moved inland, roughly along the track of the old imperial road toward Rome. As it thundered across the countryside, it tore the trestled roofs off farmhouses, stampeded flocks out of their straggling pens, and hurled debris against the crumbling stone arches of antique tenements. The trail of damage went on for nearly twenty miles. Hundreds of buildings were wrecked—some had been standing for more than a thousand years—dozens of people were injured, and three were reported killed. The spout finally collapsed on the outskirts of the old Roman suburbs.
The news of this strange visitation caused a panic throughout the region. The spout was almost universally believed to be a sign of the apocalypse. The pope was one of the few skeptics, but he kept his opinion to himself. In order to calm the populace, he announced that he was calling upon a well-regarded expert to investigate the incident and issue a public report. The expert was the most famous natural philosopher in Italy, Father Ruder Boscovich.
Father Ruder was a Croatian raised by the Jesuits of Rome. His specialty was astronomy, a subject in which he had made several major discoveries. But the pope thought of him more as an all-purpose authority on anything scientific or technical. He had once consulted him on a project to drain the Pontine Marshes. When there was an uproar in Rome because cracks had been discovered in the dome of St. Peter’s and its collapse appeared to be imminent—this, too, had been regarded as a sign of the apocalypse—Father Ruder had been called in to solve that crisis as well. He designed a set of concentric iron rings to brace the dome. The solution worked, and the father demanded and got an unusual form of payment: the pope had to agree to remove Copernicus from the Vatican’s Index of banned books.
Summoned to investigate the waterspout, Father Ruder set to work at once. He inspected the trail of ruin. He interviewed survivors and eyewitnesses. He did some research among the records of unusual meteorological events in the vast Vatican library. Then he wrote a detailed monograph laying out his investigations and conclusions. The work only took him a few months, and his monograph was printed and on sale by the end of the year—a fast turnaround time in those days for a two-hundred-page book.
The title was On the Whirlwind During the Night of June 11–12 (Sopra il turbine che la notte tra gli XI e XII giugno). Because of the speed of its composition, it was a fairly slapdash piece of work. Much of it was taken up with what anxious readers would have regarded as an irrelevant side issue: the father’s speculations on the general nature of the atmosphere. The father was highly intrigued by a recent suggestion made by the British philosopher Stephen Hales that the atmosphere wasn’t one uniform substance but a combination of many gases and particles; many pages of the book were spent exploring the idea. But at last he came to the point: his analysis of the great waterspout. Here the father was both concrete and specific. While people tended to believe that waterspouts were phenomena of the deep waters of the Mediterranean, the historical records were clear that they did sometimes appear in the shallows off the coasts, and there had been a few documented cases of waterspouts coming ashore. His conclusion was that this was a rare but not unprecedented natural occurrence, and certainly not a sign of the apocalypse.
The book was widely read in Italy, and a Latin translation was soon published for the benefit of the scientific community in Europe. (Latin was losing its dominance by then as the lingua franca of intellectual discussion, but it still had more readers than Italian.) In the summer of 1750, a year after the spout, an extended English-language synopsis and review of the book ran in the London magazine The Monthly Review. It stirred up a lot of interest. Over the next few years, several philosophers became intrigued about the nature of waterspouts. But there was clearly only one person whose opinion mattered. Copies of the Review began arriving in Benjamin Franklin’s mail, with cover letters asking what he made of it.
In his haphazard way, Franklin had come up with a few ideas about weather over the years. He had realized, for instance, that in North America large storms tended to move from southwest to northeast; this was an obvious truth that no one else in the colonies seems to have noticed. He had also grasped that in large storm systems the prevailing winds at the surface don’t necessarily reflect the direction the storm is moving in—a subtle principle that wouldn’t be fully accepted by meteorologists for another century. But none of this made him an expert on storms. His great discovery about the nature of lightning happened only because of his speculations about static electricity; thunderstorms had entered into the picture almost by accident.
But he, too, found himself fascinated by the story of the great spout. He immediately threw himself into an investigation of the nature of waterspouts. He had never seen one himself, and he wasn’t about to mount an expedition to find them; this was strictly a paper chase. He and his friends and correspondents ransacked old histories and travelers’ tales for stories of waterspouts. There wasn’t much to go on. The richest vein of material was in the back issues of the Philosophical Transactions, where there were detailed accounts sent in by explorers and ships’ officers who had long experience of the perils of waterspouts in the Mediterranean and the tropics. Some of them had even conducted their own science experiments: they had fired cannonballs at the spouts to see if that would break them up. (It didn’t work.)
As Franklin read through these stories, he very rapidly fashioned a theory; he tended to arrive at his theories in a great rush or not at all. The prevailing belief then was that a waterspout was a hollow pillar of water, rising up out of the sea or descending like a waterfall from the clouds. (The Hebrew word for “waterspout,” as used in the book of Psalms, could also be translated as “waterfall.”) Franklin immediately realized that this was physically impossible. The tube of the waterspout simply couldn’t be made out of water. Water is extremely heavy—so heavy that no force known in nature could raise or sustain such a large body of it in midair. So this meant that the solid appearance of the spout had to be an illusion. The spout, Franklin believed, was in fact an ascending column of air, and it only appeared to be made of water because a fog of water vapor was condensing around it as it rose.
Franklin then had a second and odder realization. If the spout was air and not water, then there was no necessary reason for it to be confined to seas and oceans. It could, at least in principle, appear over land as easily as it did over water. The track of the Italian waterspout already suggested as much. But where were all these native landspouts? In the Bible there were many references to mysterious whirlwinds and columns of smoke (one of them had led Israel to the promised land). But Franklin wanted evidence that was modern and unequivocal.
He found his first piece of evidence deep within the archives of the Philosophical Transactions. In the volume for the year 1703, there had appeared an account by an English minister named Abraham De la Pryme of something he had witnessed over the Yorkshire countryside. De la Pryme called it “one of those strange works of nature called spouts, or rather hurricanes.” He described it as “a great circumgyration or whirling, which made a noise somewhat like the motion of a millstone. Ever and anon it darted down out of itself a long spout, in which I observed a motion like that of
a screw.” This spout had swept through the countryside, doing minor damage to village rooftops, and had vanished as mysteriously as it had come.
This was clearly a whirlwind over land, just what Franklin was looking for. He was encouraged to go on searching. And that was how, deeper in the archives, he came across Increase Mather’s old, forgotten story of the illustrious providence—the strange cloud that had passed over Cambridge.
Franklin read through Mather’s story with minute care. (The author’s name was certain to have caught his eye anyway, because in his early childhood the Franklins and the Mathers had been family friends.) Its similarity to De la Pryme’s account of the “circumgyration” was striking. Both clouds had made strange noises, one singing and one grinding; in both there had been a curious screwlike revolving motion. They were obviously the same type of storm.
Franklin then found another story. This was a report to the Royal Society made by a British naval physician named Alexander Stuart. On an August afternoon in 1702, Stuart had witnessed a cluster of waterspouts in the Atlantic off the Barbary Coast. One passage in particular made a great impression on Franklin. “It was observable of all of them,” Stuart had written, “but chiefly of the large pillar, that towards the end it began to appear like a hollow canal, only black in the borders, but white in the middle; and though at first it was altogether black and opaque, yet one could very distinctly perceive the sea-water to fly up along the middle of this canal, as smoke does up a chimney, and that with great swiftness, and very perceptible motion.”
Franklin saw at once the resemblance to the Cambridge cloud. He compared Stuart’s description of the white column of the waterspout with Mather’s of the revolving pillar of light at the heart of the storm. “These accounts,” Franklin wrote, “the one of water-spouts, the other of a whirlwind, seem in this particular to agree; what one gentleman describes as a tube, black in the borders, and white in the middle, the other calls a black cloud with a pillar of light in it; the latter expression has only a little more of the marvellous, but the thing is the same.”
Franklin could even think of a possible explanation. He thought both witnesses were seeing sunlight illuminating the hollow column of rising air hidden within the cloud. If so, then the Cambridge cloud was the same type of cloud as the tropical waterspout. And both were like the screwlike spout that the English minister had seen in Yorkshire. Maybe it was an extraordinarily rare phenomenon, but here was plain evidence that there existed a violent whirlwind on land identical to a waterspout at sea.
What caused it? What sustained it? Where was it to be found? Franklin couldn’t begin to imagine the answers to any of these questions. He didn’t even know what the thing should be named. Sometimes he referred to his quarry as a landspout. Other times he simply called it a whirlwind.
One word he never used for it was “tornado.”
The word did exist. It had been coined sometime in the late sixteenth century. It was a mashup of two Spanish words: tronada, which means thunderstorm, and tornar, to turn, to twist, to return. It seems to have been used first by British sailors, and they may have originally meant it as a joke—a way of scoring off the tendency of Spanish and Portuguese mariners to have overly precise technical terms for the weather. Tornar plus tronada became “tornado,” because ending with an o is how English speakers have always made up words of mock Spanish.
Its actual meaning, to the extent that it had ever acquired one, was vague. Generally, it was used to describe a bad storm at sea, particularly one where the wind direction kept changing. One seventeenth-century traveler remarked that the tropics were “wonderful unwholesome … for we had nothing but tornadoes, with such thunder, lightning and rain, that we could not keep our men dry 3 hours together, which was an occasion of the infection among them.” Another wrote that his ship had been becalmed for eighteen days, “having now and then contrary winds and some tornadoes.”
But then, most of the words used for storms and tempests had indefinite meanings, or no meaning at all. “Tornado,” “hurricane,” “gale,” “whirlwind,” “windstorm,” “cyclone”—well into the nineteenth century, all these words in popular usage meant little more than “a bad storm with strong winds.” They were used interchangeably, sometimes in the same sentence: news accounts talked about “a remarkable hurricane,” “a terrible whirlwind,” “a tremendous gust of wind,” “a tremendous tornado,” “the most violent tornado or hurricane ever known in the memory of the oldest person living in this part of the country.” In only a few cases is it possible to tell what type of storm was meant. In fact most people didn’t grasp that storms even had distinct types. A storm was simply a vast outbreak of anarchy, a shapeless chaos of rain, lightning, and destructive wind.
Franklin and his circle appear to be the first natural philosophers to try to sort out storms into distinct categories. In his writings, Franklin himself seems to have used the word “tornado” only once, in order to refer to tropical storms at sea, and he meant it to indicate the kinds of storms he was specifically not interested in. One of his correspondents, the philosopher John Perkins, may have been the first person to use it in the modern sense. In a paper submitted to the Royal Society in the late 1750s, he complained about the confusing terminology being used for windstorms and how hard that made it to establish what exactly the storms were. He suggested that “tornado,” despite its original meaning, be reserved for the kind of storm that Franklin was talking about. “By the term tornado, or wind-spout,” he wrote, “I mean a violent wind which has been observed in these northern colonies a few times since they were discovered and settled by our people.”
Franklin’s first rush of forward progress was quickly stymied by the elusiveness of the subject. None of his correspondents had ever seen a landspout, and not many believed it existed. But then, they weren’t impressed with his theory of spouts generally. He composed a formal monograph laying out his best guess as to the waterspout’s internal workings, and he submitted it to the fellows of the Royal Society; not only did they fail to read it aloud to their membership, as they had with his letters on electricity, but they declined to bump it up for immediate publication. Instead, it languished with the rest of their backlog for years.
Franklin circulated the monograph among his friends and correspondents. None of them were enthusiastic. In fact their general tone was niggling, critical, and dismissive. The particular point of contention was the thing that Franklin considered the core of his whole theory: the waterspout was an ascending column of air. Nobody believed this. It was obvious that waterspouts were made of water. Nor did they accept that waterspouts rose up rather than descended. From the testimonies collected in Franklin’s own investigation, most witnesses were absolutely clear that the column of the spout reached down from the clouds to the ocean. So how could anything about Franklin’s theory be true?
Franklin’s correspondents tried to be helpful. One of them wrote condescendingly, as though correcting a clever child, that he himself had seen a waterspout and obviously knew better than Franklin did. The base of the waterspout had writhed in the ocean like the snout of an elephant, and it had distinctly emitted a loud hissing noise: this was proof that the spout was exhaling air rather than taking it in. Clearly Franklin needed to reexamine his theory and would then doubtless arrive at a correct explanation. To another correspondent, Franklin was obliged to write politely, “At present I would only say, that the opinion of winds being generated in clouds by fermentation is new to me, and I am unacquainted with the facts on which it is founded.”
The real problem—as Franklin himself realized—was that the theory didn’t work. It foundered on one essential point: how waterspouts and other whirlwinds formed. Franklin believed that there had to be some sort of near vacuum in the heart of the storm that was drawing the winds into it at great speed. But with no evidence to suggest how this vacuum might come into existence and no theory of how it could sustain itself, Franklin was at a loss to explain the hows and whys of
spouts on land or sea. He was at a dead end. In 1754, he wrote to John Perkins (one of those who’d originally sent him the magazine article about the Rome waterspout): “I am now not much nearer a conclusion in the matter of the spout than when I first read your letter.”
3
To Treat Master Franklin
In those years, the main road through the American colonies was known as the King’s Highway. Franklin spent a lot of time traveling on it during the early 1750s. He had three great projects he was engaged upon then—the same era when he was consumed by his research into the mystery of the landspout. He had founded a teaching academy in Philadelphia; he’d accepted an appointment as assistant postmaster for the colonies; and he’d become the quartermaster for an ambitious military expedition to conquer and colonize the richly fertile land of the Ohio River valley—he believed it was both inevitable and desirable that the colonists would ultimately take the entire forest from the Native Americans, and he thought it would take a major war to accomplish this. He needed money, he needed political support, and he needed influential contacts to accomplish the three tasks, and to find all these things, he needed to be on the road.
That wasn’t easy. The King’s Highway was an abysmal way of traveling. It was named not for the current king (George II) but for a much earlier one, Charles II, who had ordered the road built eighty years earlier. It still wasn’t finished. The highway threaded down through the colonies from New England to South Carolina, and everywhere it was erratic, fragmentary, and dangerous. It trailed off unpredictably in the depths of forests, or dead-ended within impassable valleys, or melted away on the outskirts of vast, gloomy bird-haunted marshes. The journey from one colony to the next could take weeks. Despite Franklin’s best efforts as postmaster, it was often said to be far quicker to get a letter from Paris to New York than it was to forward it on from New York to Massachusetts.