LEWIS Fry Richardson was born in 1881 into a Quaker family of the north of England. As his middle name suggests, he was distantly related to certain successful manufacturers of chocolate, and his nephew, Sir Ralph Richardson, became one of the foremost actors of his time. But of Lewis Fry Richardson himself, few have ever heard, and he grew up to be the epitome of the nutty professor of the story books.
One of Richardson's best known scientific papers, for example, unforgettably begins "We have observed the relative motion of a pair of parsnips . . ." Another examines the analogy between sparks and mental images, in an attempt to explain the phenomenon of sudden thoughts.
And shortly after the Titanic sank, Richardson was observed with his wife blowing a penny whistle in a rowing boat; he was using an umbrella both as an amplifier and a receiver to gauge the strength of the sound reflected from the nearby cliffs, thus anticipating the apparatus that we now call Sonar.
One of Richardson's more far fetched notions, however, was that a weather forecast could be produced by calculation. He outlined his avant garde ideas in a book called Weather Prediction by Numerical Methods, published in 1922, in which he described how the future pressure pattern could be calculated if the present state of the atmosphere was accurately known.
The theory seemed plausible, but it was a method without a means because it involved an impossible amount of calculation. The book at the time was damned with faint praise, and Richardson's notions were variously described as "admirable", "laborious" and "quixotic".
As it turned out, however, Richardson was merely a prophet born before his time. He had formulated the theory of numerical weather prediction in an era when it could be of no practical use, but in the early 1950s a major change took place. The deus ex machina was the electronic computer, which was capable of transforming these apparently eccentric theories into practical reality.
Richardson's book was republished, this time being hailed as "monumental", "epic", "grandiose", and the methods he proposed were vindicated. As the methodology and the machines improved, his techniques led in time to the accurate computer generated weather forecasts so familiar to us now. But Richardson himself, alas, did not live to see his methods implemented: he died 43 years ago today, on September 30th, 1953 just as his obsession was about to be transformed into reality.