Safety networks: fishery barometers and the outsourcing of judgement at the early Meteorological Department

In 1854 Admiral FitzRoy, acting as the first head of the Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade, initiated a project to distribute fishery barometers to poor fishing communities. Over the next eleven years until his untimely death in 1865, FitzRoy oversaw the distribution of dozens of barometers. The distribution continued after his death and many of the original barometers are still in place. FitzRoy’s tenure at the Met Department is today remembered for his innovative and controversial development of weather forecasts, the first of their kind in Britain, which were telegraphed to coastal towns to warn of impending storms. Against the backdrop of this dramatic attempt to predict the weather using the tools of telegraphy and synoptic mapping, the barometer distribution project looks like an unexceptional piece of administration, a routine shuttling of correspondence and instruments. Closer inspection reveals a case study in Victorian governance that shows how individuals could contribute to elite forms of science by remaining independent of them in key respects. Rather than providing disciplined and trustworthy registrations of nature’s language, the fishery barometers distributed by FitzRoy and the Met Department were explicitly excluded from the wider project to map British and global weather. By being thus excluded, they helped augment the autonomy of their intended users, the poor fishermen who were thereby made into better, more independent, interpreters of the Met Office forecasts. By revealing the potential for an instrument to be useful when not registering, this episode suggests that instruments could augment as well as replace the autonomous judgements of individuals.