Scientific career in India 1875-1890

Main activities and colleagues

Alec was appointed to an infant Department. C R Markham’s A Memoir of the Indian Surveys (1878) notes:

India was favoured (from a meteorological point of view) by very large plains, long river courses, and high enclosing mountains. In Blanford’s words “India lies meteorologically in a ring fence formed by mountains on the north and seas on the south, and in a degree almost unexampled elsewhere, we make our own weather. This is why Indian meteorology is instructive above all other” [15]. It was an excellent testbed, and it promised rich rewards. If the cyclones, monsoons, droughts, floods and famines could not be fully tamed, they might be understood and predicted; the weather’s influence on population size and health could be clarified; benefits for farming, navigation and business in general would flow.

But success in India, far from the scientific powerhouses of the West, needed determination. The 1891 Quarterly Journal continues:

Alec seems to have got to grips quickly and energetically: inspecting the weather stations, gathering the scattered archives, repairing and calibrating many instruments, and training and deploying the staff to good effect. His detailed notes on Allahabad storms were used by John Eliot in the 1876 Meteorological Memoirs, and soon – aged 25 or so – he began publishing “a series of most valuable papers” under his own name, in India, Britain and Austria. At least eight articles in the Memoirs appear with “S. A. Hill” as sole author. E T Atkinson’s volume on The Himálayan Districts of the North-Western Provinces of India (1882) has a long chapter by Alec on “Meteorology”. Blanford’s annual Reports on the overall administration of the Department often mention Mr. S. A. Hill’s diligent good work; and this although (or because) Alec, having re-examined years of solar radiation and sunspot data, disagreed [16] with Blanford’s initial view.

Black’s Memoir of the Indian Surveys 1875-1890 says: 

Here (with some remarks by Blanford) is the team of Reporters at the time of Alec’s first furlough: 

These names are of much interest but their stories must be skipped over. Isis Pogson (1852-1945), daughter of a distinguished astronomer, was important in the fight for equal treatment of women in professions and professional societies. John Eliot and Frederick Chambers appear briefly below. Mr Pedler, later Sir Alexander Pedler, was an expert on cobra poison. This group of weather scientists no doubt had the usual academic tiffs in private and public, with mutterings over priority and the interpretation of unreliable data. Mostly they followed polite norms of debate, but Dr Edward Lawrie, the Reporter at Lahore and a noted surgeon, was very impolite over a long career. He had strong views on chloroform anaesthesia, and the mechanisms for spreading cholera and malaria, and he spoke and wrote too fiercely.

The various Reports and administrative summaries do not show uniform success. Records could be corrupt, inconsistent, or missing. Alec collected registers from Himalayan regions “to which the civil disturbances following the mutiny of 1857 did not extend”; in Allahabad he found valuable notebooks for 1844-1855 gathering dust in the Revenue office, where the clerks may have had more pressing business. And the Observatory at Allahabad was a problem on Alec’s doorstep. Clearly the facilities should be refreshed and made convenient for the University, and Alec was the man to oversee the project, but he and Blanford were in a bind. The University buildings were of striking “Saracenic” design, and the authorities would not hear of new works in a clashing style: Mr Emerson, the original architect [17], must be brought on board.

Emerson seems to have asked for high fees, and the matter stalled. The Observatory remained at the premises of the Reporter – that is, in the nine-acre grounds of the Hill villa – for some time. As Alec wrote in the Meteorological Memoirs: 

Blanford in the Report for 1882-1883: The establishment of a first class observatory at Allahabad, which was originally sanctioned in 1875, and for which a costly meteorograph has been obtained from Europe more than two years ago, has, I regret to say, made but little progress. This, as appears from Mr. Hill's report, is owing to certain difficulties with reference to the site selected for the new observatory…The dilemma does not appear to be one from which an escape should present many difficulties, and meanwhile there is not a small risk that the value of much of the work already done at Allahabad may be sacrificed. The present observatory is at Mr. Hill's private house and must be removed, sooner or later…

Then The provision of proper buildings for the proposed first class observatories at Lahore and Allahabad, which has been in abeyance for nearly ten years, has at length been partially and will shortly be wholly effected. At last The new Allahabad Observatory is situated in the large open space known as the Chatham lines – a site admirably fitted for the purpose. This long-running annoyance (c. 1880-1886) was made worse by problems with Belgian instruments, as described below.

Nature carried in 1883 a three-part survey of “Indian Meteorology” by E. D. (Douglas) Archibald, concentrating on the Meteorological Memoirs. Alec’s multiple analyses and contributions are prominently mentioned (“raise a question of general importance…most interesting and important…Prof. Hill speculates very intelligently…valuable and highly suggestive…so eminently exhaustive, and withal attractive, that it virtually forms an almost complete epitome in miniature of meteorological science”). Archibald and Hill more or less agreed in their conclusions, but there was much dissent and some rudeness by others in the scientific journals.

Now came the first “furlough”, the voyage to America and Ireland, and election to the RMS on 20 February 1884 (when William Marriott’s paper on the great storm of 26 January 1884 was read). Upon resuming work Alec published on solar thermometer readings from Lucknow and Allahabad, “Some Anomalies in the Winds of Northern India”, and Indian population statistics; on unusual rainbows and unusual behaviour in bathtubs; on barometric records (printed in German); on tornadoes and hailstorms; and on Ballyboley air temperature and rainfall (see below). It appears that, as Edmonia and others say, he was normally – that is, most impressively – hardworking and productive almost up to his short final illness.

 Meteorological instruments from Belgium and America

         The “costly meteorograph” mentioned above was due to François van Rysselberghe (1846-1893), a Flemish scientist known to Blanford who had adopted and improved mechanisms for automatic recording/engraving, and was prominent in related fields of communications (telegraphy, and multiplex telephony), street lighting, and maritime meteorology. His obituary in Ciel et Terre describes the problem he set himself:

In 1873 General Liagre, Perpetual Secretary of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium, strongly praised this “simple, accurate, very ingenious, and comparatively cheap” invention, by means of which the indications of “a great number of meteorological instruments of any kind” could be permanently engraved on its rotating cylinder. The Geographical Exhibition and Congress at Paris in 1875 awarded van Rysselberghe “letters of exhibition”: 

It was indeed a merveille mécanique et électrique, powered by clockwork and electricity. Van Rysselberghe’s paper “On a Universal System of Meteorography” was read to the RMS on 17 February 1875 and then printed with useful illustrations in the Quarterly Journal. “The Belgian Government has granted me a liberal subsidy for the installation of a definitive and complete apparatus…The meteorograph constructed by M. Schubart, of Ghent [18], for the new Ostend Observatory, gives, at every quarter of an hour, the indications of syphon-barometer, wet and dry bulb thermometers, Saussure’s hygrometer, Robinson’s anemometer, vane, rain-gauge, and the height of the sea-level in Ostend harbour, because the above expounded method is enabled to give the records of several instruments placed at a great distance from the recorder”. 

In 1876 South Kensington Loan Exhibition gave further publicity to the “complete meteorograph, which records on the same form and to the same time-scale the various meteorological elements and the height of the tide” [19]. 

In 1879 Van Rysselberghe prepared an estimate for a central recording station in Brussels linked with four remote or “secondary” stations. Each secondary would have a météorographe-graveur costing about 5500 Belgian francs. The price included:

         - barometer, psychrometer, and Robinson anemometer (Anémomètre-Girouette)

         - rain gauge (Udomètre), with  a heater to cope with snow

         - clock, battery pile (20 éléments Meidinger), and plaque for preparing the recording plates.

The central station would have a single receiver, with four engravers (burins), costing about 3500 francs. Van Rysselberghe recommended a reserve of 1000 francs for unforeseen expenses and for a transmitter battery (48 éléments Leclanché probablement). Each remote station would be connected to the centre by a telegraph wire of minimum diameter 4 mm [20].

     In July 1881 Van Rysselberghe was preparing an exhibition stand in Paris. But the opening was delayed; he was thoroughly bored, amid too much noise, nuisance and dust; everyone was pressing him for des explications détaillées. He expected to have the météorographe set up and working in a few days, and would then return to Brussels, but would need to revisit Paris to deal with the Télémétéorographe. And Belgium’s Minister of the Interior had sent a letter appointing him as Government delegate to the associated Electricians’ Congress. This could hardly be refused:

J’ai accepté, évidemment, et je vous remercie bien vivement, Cher Directeur d’avoir obtenu pour moi cette distinction.

Le Ministre me prévient dans sa lettre que la mission de représenter le gouvernement au Congrès est purement honorifique et qu’il ne sera accordé ni frais de route ni frais de séjour ni indemnité d’aucune sorte.

That is, the honour came with zero funds to cover his expenses. Van Rysselberghe grew peeved and rhetorical:

Je trouve cela très-peu démocratique. Certes, je ne suis pas poussé par une sotte vanité, ce n’est pas la recherche de la gloriole qui me guide. 

Je poursuis – ou plutôt nous poursuivons un but utile, avouable; et si vous étiez Ministre de l’Intérieur, vous trouverez, Directeur, j’en suis sûr, qu’il n’est pas question seulement d’une mission honorifique!?

Later that year, in more elevated but flatter French, Director Houzeau announced the award of the Légion d’honneur:

According to the Bulletin of the Belgian Royal Academy, by the close of 1879 meteorographs had been adopted by the observatory in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the Austrian navy, the Dutch observatories in Batavia and Japan [21] and le gouvernement des Indes anglaises. Blanford described the “Van Rysselberghe and Schubart’s Meteorograph” to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on 6 April 1881. Two samples had been ordered:

“While awaiting the provision…”: Alec’s report for 1881-82, dated 5 May 1882, is blunt about the Allahabad / Emerson saga: 

That appendix by Surgeon-Major Hendley [22] says “The Van Rysselberghe instrument will cost about Rs. 4,000”. Comparisons were and are difficult because of the different lifestyles and costs in Europe and India, the depreciation of the rupee, and the question of the silver and gold standards (see Alec’s 1886 letter below). But Rs. 4000 agrees more or less with the £160 in The Journal of the Society of Arts (see above) for an 1875 version. £200 might be closer for an 1880 update. Belvedere House was offered for rental at Rs. 120 per month while the Hills were travelling, their white mare who “would make an excellent polo pony” was priced at Rs. 250, and they asked Rs. 700 for the Lipp & Co. piano “double strung, in perfect order, as good as new”. The total cost for Alec’s region in 1884-85 was about three meteorographs:

Still, the Van Rysselberghe system was about half the price of competing meteorographs such as Fr Angelo Secchi’s (which won the Grand Prize at the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition).

It is fairly clear from Van Rysselberghe’s notes that care, skill and patience were needed for the installations, either for public exhibition or for paying customers. From Gand, on 9 December 1878, he wrote to his Director asking for two days of leave to complete essential pre-delivery work:

de faire ici, dans les ateliers de M Shubart [sic], toutes les vérifications nécessaires pour m’assurer de la bonne marche et de l’exactitude du Météorographe graveur destiné à l’Observatoire de Bruxelles.

Je crains que si je n’agis pas ainsi je ne pourrai pas garantir la régularité et la continuité du service de l’appareil à partir du 1 janvier prochain.

…Je serai alors mardi et mercredi à Gand, chez M Schubart [?] rue courte du Marais. 

Would the merveille’s electromechanicals cope with Indian heat and humidity, not to mention insects, rodents and the Asiatic Society examiners? Murray Thomson (officiating in Alec’s place during his furlough) wrote in the 1883-84 Report: 

As has more than once been stated in these reports, it is intended to have a first class observatory at Allahabad, and the self-recording instruments intended for it have been lying unused in Calcutta for many months. All that is wanted is a suitable building in which to erect them.

The two devices, marked as No. 1 (Allahabad) and No. 2 (Jeypore [23]), were intended as duplicates. But No. 2 was more reliable, no doubt because it received better care. Surgeon Owen wrote that it was “on the whole satisfactory” throughout 1883-84:

Surgeon-Major Hendley (en route for England and furlough), visiting Schubart in Gand in July 1883, ordered these new springs “capable of resisting the extreme changes of temperature at Jaipur”. But a new Meidinger battery, ordered at the same time, had not arrived 18 months later.

On 5 December 1885 the Madras Mail summarised (from Blanford’s 1884-85 Report):

Note that individual “self-registering” or “autographic” instruments were common, but they were not the same as, and not necessarily linked with, Van Rysselberghe systems. The météorographe or Universal Recorder was a Victorian-technology time-stamped multi-channel data-logger, recording from its own local instruments and, if desired, from other remote ones. The Reports mention only two meteorographs ordered from Belgium.

Meanwhile Alec, visiting the New York observatory during his 1883 American tour, had admired Daniel Draper’s set of instruments: “very much simpler in their mechanism than the beautiful meteorograph of Van Rysselberghe” [24]. Alec and Draper already knew each other’s work in the 1870s (e.g. the references in letters on “Indian rainfall” in Nature of 25 April and 20 June 1878). When the meteorograph intended for Lahore was claimed by the Maharajah of Jeypore for his own observatory, the opportunity for “something much simpler and demanding less experience in the use of delicate mechanism and practical physics” was taken: for Lahore a similar Draper set (for pressure, temperature and humidity) was ordered, and existing Beckley rainfall and wind recorders were added. We may infer that Alec’s opinion carried weight, though the 1885-86 Report says “The Lahore Observatory still awaits the arrival of some of the autographic instruments”.

The same five parameters were to be recorded by the Allahabad meteorograph, No. 1. Once the Observatory was rebuilt on its “admirably fitted” Chatham Lines one-acre site, hopes were high. Then Blanford noted:

Edmonia was unimpressed:

A fully equipped first-class observatory was now established at this station, with nineteen observatories reporting to the office. The electro-magnetic engraving meteorograph, built by Van Rysselberghe for this observatory, was set up, interesting him much, but requiring constant care and thought, and untold patience with native workmen inexperienced in anything of that kind [ETH].

Blanford had to form a defensive line:

Alec in April 1887: “At the time of writing last year’s report I hoped that most of the difficulties experienced with the Allahabad instrument, No. 1, had been overcome; but further experience proved that this hope was illusory, for the instrument is so delicate in its construction, and before coming here had undergone so much wear and tear, that it never could be got to work tolerably well for more than a week at a time. As further experience was gained of its many ways of getting out of order, several defects in construction became manifest, the most important of which were defective insulation of the wires and permanent magnetism of the cores of some of the electromagnets….the instrument was accordingly taken down and the defective parts despatched to the maker, T. Schubart, in Ghent”. No.2, more reassuringly, “in the hands of Mr. Callaghan, the electrician, has now given good, and nearly continuous, traces for four or five years”. Alec’s verdict on the Allahabad model remained harsh, and the next year he described other troubles:

These are some of many comments and inspection reports where instruments are badly sited, poorly housed, carelessly read, “somewhat neglected”, “very dirty”, “coated with calcareous deposit”, “introducing an uncorrected error” and so on.

In August 1889 Sir John Eliot wrote:

The 1889-90 Report was the last to which Alec contributed directly. Eliot wrote:

Eliot’s Report dated 1 August 1891: 

I am unsure whether Alec personally knew this Flemish contemporary of similar age, interests and precocity – a professor aged 17 at the Ostend School of Navigation, and soon after a professor of physics at the Industrial School. Nor is it clear whether, in the medium term, unreliable and costly equipment caused more or less trouble than “cheap” but training-intensive and error-prone clerks [25]. We may “confidently” expect that other political and technical difficulties of these years were omitted from the Reports. 

The meteorograph was extremely delicate and expensive to maintain, admitted François-Jacques-Philippe Folie, a later Director of the Royal Belgian Observatory, in his obituary of Van Rysselberghe. But so, he added, were its competitors. He also mentioned Van Rysselberghe’s studies of winds at different altitudes, with schemes for instrumented kites and balloons.

From 1882 Van Rysselberghe worked less on meteorology and more on long-distance telecommunications. The staff of the RBO have found several letters and telegrams about his work on meteorographs, both at Schubart’s premises and on site at exhibitions, but nothing that relates to the le gouvernement des Indes anglaises. The Library of the University of Ghent has letters from Van Rysselberghe, with one praising an English instrument worth 20 livres sterling, minimum, but nothing on meteorographs or Schubart.

Louis Dufour (1909-1985), another distinguished Belgian meteorologist, wrote about the early success and overseas sales: Nous serions très heureux de savoir ce que sont devenus ces appareils et comment ils se comportèrent [26]. One example in the RBO was running dans un pavillon édifié dans la cour d’honneur until about 1894; but after a move indoors (apparently to protect against winter condensation) it was taken to bits and cannibalised (stupidement démonté par un mécanicien qui en utilisa les rouages pour d’autres usages). Dufour inspected another at the University of Ghent, in fair working order apart from the mechanism (malheureusement disparu) for recording barometric pressure.

Actinometry, rays and spots 

The actino- prefix relates to rays or beams, and “actinometrics” and “actinographs” involve measurements of the levels of heat and light, especially from the sun. For earthbound observers this brings complicated issues of atmospheric transmission / absorption / refraction / heating (all varying with wavelength), as well as many practical questions of construction and instrumental error (glass windows, thermometer bulbs, photochemical reactions). Alec’s photography was thus “actinographic” in a way, and enjoyed as both a hobby and a professional interest. Some of his technical papers directly examine solar radiative physics [27] Exploring the effects of light was an obsessive interest for Van Rysselberghe’s younger brother Théo. [28]. With Blanford, Alec played a minor early role in what might now be called time series analysis or spectral estimation, because after detailed inspection he proposed relations between sunspot cycles and meteorological observables. Today’s Indian Government meteorological department (www.imd.gov.in) says:

S. A. Hill suggested in 1879 that the yearly variation in the temperature over northern India was greatest around the time of sunspot minimum and lowest during sunspot maximum. But this study was based on a short time interval and there were some large departures from this rule.

Blanford, writing in 1884 “On the Connexion of the Himalaya Snowfall with Dry Winds and Seasons of Drought in India”, referred to work by Archibald [29] and “Mr. J. A. Hill” (a misprint) that linked rainfall with sunspot variations.

Alec had or renewed access to substantial records in India, but they covered (patchily) only three or four 11-year cycles – short of the “many” cycles desired for classical estimates of frequencies – and he knew of irritating instrumental and human fallibilities. In “Results of the meteorological measurements taken at Allahabad” (Indian Meteorological Memoirs, vol. I, X, pp. 311-359) he says:

He was far from the first to notice sunspot-linked regularities, but after careful collation and checking – and with the boldness to stick his head out in public – he pointed to the links with Indian rainfall and other measurables such as rates of birth, death, crime, and disease.

It is therefore possible that the rate of increase of a primitive people, living a natural life untrammelled by too much civilization, and multiplying up to the limit of the means of subsistence, may be subject – like the prices of grain, investigated by Mr. E. Chambers and the late Mr. Stanley Jevons, and like many other terrestrial phenomena – to a periodic variation determined by that of the energy received from the sun. [30]

His contributions were recognised in print by Archibald, Chambers, Blanford and others [31]. Over some decades, and not only in India, the problems of untangling the regularities in sunspot activity and solar radiation were central in discussions of “short” time series and what we mean by frequencies and spectra. Alec has a high but not primary credit in this story. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica says of sunspot-related oscillations: “The literature on this subject has assumed large proportions. The results, however, have not been satisfactory. The problem is difficult and obscure...In some cases the relation to sun-spot periodicity is open to debate; in others, the results are contradictory…S. A. Hill found it to be true of the Indian summer monsoon rains that there seems to be an excess in the first half of the cycle, after the sun-spot maximum. The winter rains of northern India, however, show the opposite relation; the minimum following, or coinciding with, the sun-spot maximum. Particular attention has been paid to the sun-spot cycle of rainfall in India, because of the close relation between famines and the summer monsoon rainfall in that country…Relations between the sun-spot period and various other meteorological phenomena than temperature, rainfall and tropical cyclones have been made the subject of numerous investigations, but on the whole the results are still too uncertain to be of any but a theoretical value”.

More and better data, and different mathematical approaches, became available in the twentieth century. Alec missed these developments by twenty or thirty years, as he missed the budding theories of quantum physics and relativity. So when Meteorological Department scientists are mentioned in this context (sunspot analysis, Schuster periodograms, “autoregression” analysis) he is in the second or third rank: Gilbert Walker [32] published important papers in the Indian Meteorological Memoirs, and Walker referred to Blanford’s work on Himalayan rain and drought, and Blanford referred to E. D. Archibald and S. A. Hill. It is true in retrospect that Alec and colleagues were never going to extract reliable deterministic “harmonic” features that would (for example) predict monsoons and cyclones with the required accuracy. Their records were too corrupt, incomplete and short; there was no guarantee that the “noise” had desirable abstract attributes (random? zero-mean? Gaussian?); the Himalayan / Gangetic weather was simply not well described by any classical, tractable, deterministic model.

Alec would have grumpily admitted most of this, and taken an interest in the new modelling. He did admit some of it in print, while trying his best to correct the human and mechanical errors; he was well aware, and helped to convince Blanford, of the importance of measurements at high altitude – a topic central to Walker’s later discoveries; and it should not be forgotten that those ledgers of unreliable readings were sometimes the only data to hand for Walker and Blanford, and that Alec took the lead in their recovery and re-examination [33].

Again, Alec’s work on population statistics was novel, thorough, highly praised, but – as later researchers concluded – necessarily limited because the raw data (especially on births) were not complete or accurate. His results are quoted by early sociologists such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Westermarck, and in publications for and against Darwinism and eugenics.

More evidence of Civil Service strops, of a kind known today, is in the annual administrative reports:

Frederick Chambers was most unhappy about his treatment and complained in 1890

…That I have performed the duties of that office [“Meteorological Reporter for the whole of Western India”] in an unusually meritorious manner, but that, nevertheless, the Government of India has abolished the office and thrown me out of employment for no fault of my own…I have made many important advances in meteorological science, and have myself discovered those relations between sun-spots, barometric relations, rainfall and famines, which now form the basis on which forecasts of the seasons are framed by the Indian Meteorological Department…

And thus he requested “a special enhanced compensation pension for extraordinarily meritorious services” [34].

Dr Thomson (who performed Alec’s duties during the 1883-84 furlough) was overqualified and underemployed in the 1870s. The resulting memos were cheerful: “The fact is that Dr. Murray Thomson is rather an incubus on us” [“A.B.S.”, 7 August 1876]…“I fear we have no keddah for white elephants” [“A.P.H.”, 21 August 1876].

There are many other discussions about payments and division of duties. Some better clerks and assistants gained “special allowances”, typically of five or ten rupees per month, later queried because (not very surprisingly) it was realised that a bonus or incentive scheme has both pros and cons; those with bonuses take them for granted, and those without are disgruntled. There is much more in the archives on Sir John Eliot’s efficiency drives and management reorganisations; at one point in the Reports Alec is explicitly required by Eliot for “special investigations” and therefore to be relieved of some tedious duties [35].

Another letter published in Nature (20 October 1887) shows Alec observant:

A RAINBOW after sunset is probably a somewhat unusual occurrence, but on the evening of September 11 I witnessed a very beautiful one from the band-stand in the Alfred Park, which is about the highest ground in Allahabad. Just before sunset the sky was more or less covered with high cirro-stratus, and promised one of the very highly-coloured sunsets common in the rainy season, while at the same time a slight storm, heralded by distant thunder, was coming up from the east. After spending a few minutes in the Public Library near the band-stand, I came out, and found the sun had set behind a bank of what Abercromby calls “rocky cumulus,” or some other lumpy form of cloud, and was sending long shafts of alternate light and shadow across the southern half of the sky, while towards the north and overhead the clouds were lighted up with the most gorgeous colours. On turning to the east to see whether the flutings of the cloud-shadows appeared to meet in that quarter, as they usually do, I saw on the approaching shower, which was towards east-south-east, a beautiful double rainbow, both arcs being some 20° long, but stopping short of the horizon by 1½° or 2°, to which height the earth-shadow already extended.

This sparked a correspondence about similar sightings at Melbourne and Noumea.

Bathtubs

The issue of Nature for 9 June 1887 has a further and not quite expected link to optical science, via a Greek etymology. 

Little’s Soluble Phenyle (made by Morris, Little & Co.) was one of many popular disinfectants and antiseptics, and apparently one of the better ones.

The only drawback to the application of Listerism in cataract operations that I have experienced has been with regard to the spray. Carbolic acid irritates the cornea and conjunctiva and I had to abandon its use; and all the other antiseptics we have tried have proved unsatisfactory except the one we now employ, which is Little’s Soluble Phenyle obtained from Messrs. Baird & Co., Lahore. I have been using this lately in the proportion of 1–80 for the spray and cleansing lotions…

This is from an 1882 Indian Medical Gazette paper by Dr Lawrie. Then in the 1907 Gazette Dr William Hossack, the District Medical Officer in Calcutta, reported on the potency of various disinfectants against Indian rat fleas (Pulex cheopis). The Soluble Phenyle performed well, even when diluted to 1 part in 800. But scientific caution was needed:

I am not sure that Alec’s query was answered. Possibly, after the initial rapid expansion – a great increase in surface area in a time less than a second – one of the more volatile ingredients had already evaporated significantly, so that both the composition of the thin film and the balance of forces were already changing. This would complicate the usual textbook calculations. Alec’s trials with widely different bath temperatures were intelligent but not conclusive [36].

Elephants 

The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal printed Alec’s account of the Northern India storms of 30 April and 1 May 1888, “most unusually fatal to human and animal life, as well as destructive to crops and trees”. There were lethal hailstones the size of cricket balls and melons. He sounds conventionally patronising – “It is greatly to be regretted that in none of the storms mentioned was any competent European officer able to devote his time to the local investigation of the direction and force of the wind…no local meteorological observations are forthcoming” – but there is a happy addendum:

As Mr. Mackintosh, the Collector of Moradabad, very justly remarks, when people's roofs have been carried off, or are tumbling in, the circumstances are not conducive to the taking of correct observations...For the Budaun storm the tahsildars give curious and fanciful estimates of the wind's force, which at one place was considered equal to the strength of 3 elephants and in another to 16 horses combined.

His Appendix II, “Extracts from the Telegraphic and Correspondence Columns of the Pioneer (Allahabad)”, has further details of lightning strikes, ruined mango crops, and fatalities under collapsed huts or falling lumps of ice. In Naini Tal, the hill station where he wrote his 1887 letter about phenyle, “Government House suffered severely, and nearly two hundred panes of glass were broken by the hail”. We might now talk of the extended Beaufort scale with local winds of 90 mph, but the elephant unit of wind force deserves a footnote in meteorological history [37].

Observations in Ballyboley

This small area of Antrim countryside, just outside Ballynure and below the slopes of Ballyboley Forest, featured in the Quarterly Journal:

Thomas H(anna) Craig, responsible for the readings of temperature and rainfall which Alec collated and summarised, was the local schoolmaster [38]. His Lower Ballyboley school is now the Pipe Band hall. Unluckily Alec's map reference is not very “exact” and in any case seems misprinted. If we take it literally (54o 43’ or 54.7167 north, 5o 59’ or 5.9833 west) we are in a Lisnalinchy field some miles away from the easily identified former railway junction, the steep slope, and the two streams. Such a large error is unlikely with the geolocation skills and notations of the 1880s. Alec’s convention for the (nonspherical) Earth when quoting latitude and longitude would disagree with more modern mapping conventions and satellite-verified grids, but not by miles. The school is roughly 54.78828 north, 5.95789 west.

Textbooks

The planning, publishing and financing of Alec’s textbooks generated the usual files of correspondence. As was and is often the case, the pupils’ books required an accompanying volume (Teachers’ Manual of Geography) and for this Alec would receive an “honorarium” of Rs. 1,200:

This extra volume was not expected to make a profit, and the money offered for completing Alec’s work was not attractive.

Ruchi Ram Sahni

One colleague was singled out in the Reports. By 1885 Alec had fresh responsibilities in “Rajputana, and Central India (part.)”, and Blanford’s staff in Simla included a 2nd Assistant:

Lala [39] Ruchi Ram Sahni (1863-1948) had been talent-spotted and trained as the first native scientist (as opposed to clerk or calculator) in the Department:

The promise was fulfilled: 

For example the Pioneer of 9 March 1887 reassures its readers that recent heavy rainfall, and Himalayan low temperatures, are not particularly unusual. It quotes not only figures but the cautious opinion of “The officer in charge of the daily weather reports, Lala Ruchi Ram Sahni”, who had prepared tables of rainfall covering several years.

Mr. Blanford endorses the conclusion, stating in a postscript that there are certainly no facts before us so far to justify either a dismal or cheerful prognosis of the coming season.

Ruchi Ram Sahni became a professor of chemistry in Lahore, a co-author of atomic physics papers with Rutherford in Manchester, and an important patriotic agitator and colleague of Gandhi [40]. Although not a violent partisan, he opposed the prevailing Imperialist views, and he lived to see India’s independence. His 1940s memoir, now published and becoming better known, has decided opinions on his 1885-1887 colleagues. Blanford is highly praised. John Eliot is battered for plain unpleasantness and racism. Alec perhaps emerges with a score draw: he recruited Ruchi Ram Sahni (much as he, another bright student, had been recruited ten years before), did not hesitate to criticise him, and was in turn – this is unusual – criticised and reprimanded.

I began my official career in the India Meteorological Department under Mr. H. F. Blanford, F.R.S, an angelic officer, on the 10th January, 1885. Towards the end of March 1887, my services were transferred to the Punjab Education Department as assistant Professor of Science (Physics and Chemistry) in the Government College, Lahore, from which I retired as Senior Professor of Chemistry on 15th April, 1918, at the age of 55…

In the first week of 1885, Professor Oman [41] showed me a semi-official letter, asking him to recommend to the head of the Meteorological Department, a suitable science graduate who would care to take up a gazetted post as Assistant Meteorological Reporter to the Government of India. Professor Oman strongly advised me to try for the job…Within a few days, I was telegraphically asked to see Mr. A. S. Hill [sic [42]], Professor of Physics at Central Muir College, Allahabad. Mr. H. F. Blanford was on leave at the time [43] and Mr. Hill was acting for him temporarily. Several candidates from other provinces had already been interviewed by Mr. Hill, before I appeared before him on the 10th January 1885. I cannot say that I was better qualified than the other candidates, but Mr. Hill seemed to be especially pleased with my answer to one or two questions. These question which probably induced Mr. Hill to decide in my favour were related to the cyclones…

While I was at the Meteorological Office, a particularly virulent attack upon me appeared in the columns of the Pioneer of Allahabad, then the most influential paper in India. In one of the articles, the paper referred to a certain ‘daily report’ of mine and complained that I had failed to give the forecast of the weather that I could and should have given on the basis of the available data. The writer added that the time had not come for a ‘native’ to be appointed to a responsible scientific post. He had no grievance, he pointed out, against the particular individual who had been put in charge of the onerous duties for which an European alone was the fittest person. The criticism closed with a reference to the fact that the daily weather Report was sent to foreign countries, including Russia, and that the Russians would have but small regard for the Government of India when they realised that a native had been appointed to such a responsible post. I brought the offensive article to the notice of Mr. Blanford and asked permission to reply to it, pointing out to him at the same time that the data before me was quite insufficient, and that his own instructions were not to venture on a forecast unless there was a reasonable possibility of its turning out to be correct. He said his own rule was not to enter into a newspaper controversy on such matters, especially as the opponent was not a scientific man. I had no option but to keep quiet. A young man is however, very impatient to justify himself, if he can and I was no exception to this. After a few weeks, the time came for me to write the ‘monthly weather report.’ I now seized the opportunity to discuss the point in some detail to which the Pioneer had made reference without mentioning the paper itself. In submitting this report to Mr. Blanford, I drew his kind attention to the matter and begged him to let my remarks stand with such corrections or alterations as he might consider it necessary or desirable to make. My chief heartily congratulated me for the manner in which I had set out the facts of the case, and returned the report to me for publication with a brief supporting note of his own below.

Returning to Simla after some months Mr. Blanford asked me if I knew who the writer of the article in the Pioneer was. I said I had no means of knowing the name of the writer. I was then informed by him that it was Mr. Hill, the very man who had selected me for my post. Mr. Hill was Professor of Physics in the Central Muir College, Allahabad, and Provincial Reporter for the N. W. Provinces. Mr. Blanford also told me that he had written a strong personal letter to him.

Ruchi Ram Sahni had a justifiable chip on his shoulder. Blanford could do little wrong:

I need not say much about the human side of my kind boss, but if all Englishmen were like Mr. Blanford, the social and political relations between the two races of which we hear so much would have been quite different from what, unfortunately, we find them today. We never exchanged a word about politics and, indeed, the one topic of our conversation and of common interest was science in general and the science of weather, in particular.

But Blanford was the exception, and when Eliot replaced him there was an unfortunate event. Ruchi Ram Sahni had returned to the Government College in Lahore (which is why he disappears from the Reports):

As a matter of fact I knew, that Mr John Eliot was a ‘native hater’. Several Bengali friends had mentioned this to me — giving him the very epithet which I have used…One day I called on Mr. Eliot. He did not offer me a chair and, indeed, there was no spare chair in the room. His first words were: “What can I do for you?” “Mr. Eliot, would you mind sending a brief report about my work here to the Punjab Education Department,” I replied. The answer which I received was unbelievably insulting. Getting into a futile rage, he said, “I do not know if Mr. Blanford had a special berth for you.” “I am glad to be out of the reach of your berth, Mr. Eliot.” With these words I quitted the room…I had not the foggiest notion that Mr. Blanford’s successor in office could behave no better than a cad.

No better than a cad is clear enough, and Ruchi Ram Sahni makes another point:

In my time every attempt was made to keep out Indians from the higher appointments in the Education Department, especially in the teaching line.

One could construct Alec’s defence along familiar lines. Indian employees were habituated to a system of work, with procedures and a hierarchy. Ruchi Ram Sahni says he was at first apprehensive about promotion and its challenges and responsibilities (“independent charge of the Simla office”); his youth and fatherhood (with his first child born 31 October 1886) might have added to the stress. Prof. Hill, with ten years of experience of red tape and obstacles both human and technical, and currently fighting his expensive newly installed instruments (see above), may have lost patience: it was the 2nd Assistant’s job to assure the supply of reliable data, or failing that to alert his superiors explicitly and without delay, not to keep quiet or pass the buck. The absence or poor quality of raw data was not his fault, but it occurred on what was now his watch. That is a harsh but reasonable view. Alec may or may not have held it, but he behaved badly if he wrote the Pioneer letter anonymously and did not give Ruchi Ram Sahni a fair hearing and a chance to respond.