In a cluttered Victorian drawing room surrounded by blowpipes, handmade apparatus, thermometers and delicate meteorological instruments, Dr John Aitken embarked on his personal and remarkable cloud-busting quest.
Wracked by poor health that forced him to halt work as a marine engineer in the shipbuilding industry, one of Scotland’s great unsung scientific minds had created his makeshift “climate change” laboratory.
And there, driven by a compulsion to explore some of our weather’s perplexing mysteries, he set about tirelessly battling to overcome challenges using his handmade apparatus and lending his name to the tiny rain-making particles he discovered.
While today’s climate and pollution challenges are embroiled with fantastical multi-million-pound projects using highly sophisticated equipment – such as Harvard scientists’ bid to replicate a volcanic explosion and send particles into the atmosphere to divert the Sun’s rays – Dr Aitken worked with mirrors, glass bottles and magnifying glasses to carry out his one-man experiments.
Tucked away in the messy drawing room of his Falkirk home, he unravelled the mysteries behind rain and air pollution.
He also discovered what makes the sunset’s dazzling colours, rainbows and the morning dew and also why glaciers shift and our breath becomes visible on a frosty day, and whether passing comets could alter the Earth’s atmosphere.
His findings – including ground-breaking work on aerosol particles and pollution – earned praise from his peers. The Royal Society of Edinburgh showered him with awards in recognition of his life’s work, while he gave his name to the tiny particles, Aitken nuclei and the Aitken dust counter.
However, in a nation justifiably proud of its scientific achievements, Dr Aitken – who died 100 years ago this year – drifted into obscurity.
Now a project in his home town designed to highlight the area’s often lost industry and culture, is preparing to revisit his remarkable contribution.
Helen Rashad, project coordinator of Falkirk’s Heritage Lottery-funded Great Places, said it offered a chance to reflect on Dr Aitken’s achievements.
“It can be easy to miss the history just down your street – and this is a perfect example. Who would think to picture a brilliant scientist finding explanations for everything from the colour of a sunset to the formation of a cloud in a lab set up in his home?
“We have some of Dr Aitken’s original papers in the Falkirk archives and they’ve been displayed in temporary exhibitions. We hope we’ll be able to introduce Aitken and many more interesting characters from the Falkirk area’s past to a wider audience.”
Although relatively unknown, Dr Aitken’s drawing room discoveries – such as the role of atmospheric aerosol particles in making rain and cloud physics – stunned his 19th-century peers.
Today they are often at the heart of modern practices to tackle droughts such as cloud seeding, and pollution research.
“He is a little forgotten, and he was certainly a pioneer,” says Will Morgan, a post-doctoral research scientist at Manchester University interested in pollution and atmospheric aerosols.
“He was the first to really quantitatively describe airborne pollution concentrations, and the technique he developed is still the basis for many instruments of that type used today.”
One of his experiments involved using a basic “cloud in a bottle” technique, in which he shot a steam jet into a jar to watch the moisture form a cloud.
He then repeated it with a spotlessly clean jar free of dust to show how no cloud would appear. It confirmed that water vapour will not condense to form a cloud unless it has a surface to cling to.
Today large-scale alteration of aerosols is one potential element of modern solar geoengineering; the idea suggests adjusting aerosols on a massive scale to reflect some of the Sun’s energy back into space, helping to reduce global warming.
Meanwhile cloud seeding – introducing a chemical to clouds to create rain or snow – has been used since the 1950s to tackle drought and reduce hail damage to crops.
One Aitken treatise in 1880 discussed how “sulphur in its different forms when burned is most active as a fog producer”, while his work on pollution shed light on its causes and possible remedies at a time when cities were often choked by smog and fog.
Another work published four years later attributed the deep red sunset on the horizon to the presence of dust particles in the atmosphere.
Aitken ventured outside to find dew is caused by vapour rising from the ground and not moisture falling from above.
His findings were particularly remarkable given the almost chaotic conditions in which he worked.
“Most of the apparatus used in his researches was not only devised by him but constructed with his own hand,” wrote renowned physicist and seismologist, Cargill G. Knott, in the preface to the Collected Scientific Papers of John Aitken.
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