Author(s): Ian James Frazer

History

Clement Wragge is sometimes remembered as the colourful and combative Australasian meteorologist whose use of people's names to nickname cyclones and storms in the 1890s caught on around the world. A century after his death, runners in an annual race up the UK's highest mountain, Ben Nevis in Scotland, celebrate his superhuman achievement of scaling the icy mountain daily in order to record weather data so as to pave the way for a permanent observatory.

This is the first full biography of Wragge's life - the strange story of a self-taught meteorologist from England's industrial Midlands, a 19th century scientist with 21st century anxieties. He trusted in physics perfected by a Creator and held profound fears about the big picture for humanity, yet Wragge had an irrepressible faith in human ingenuity to overcome.