Among others, French artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740-1812) also chronicled the metamorphosis from pastoral scene to industrial workplace. In his 1802 painting, The Ironworks, Coalbrook Dale by Night, the fiery night-time scene of the ore-smelting works appear as frightful as a Halloween cauldron.
Meanwhile, scientists were also observing atmospheric changes and weather deviations, and the exhibition tracks those findings as well. In 1833, British chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772–1864) published his 700-page study, The Climate of London. His examination of a decade’s worth of London’s daily temperature readings, water levels, rainfall and wind direction led him to conclude the existence of what he called an urban “heat island” effect. The accompanying exhibition label explains the process behind Howard’s findings: “Because buildings, roads and other urban infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat, cities tend to be several degrees warmer than less developed areas with trees and bodies of water.” Howard also noted that such changes in temperature coincided with a phenomenon he named “city fog” – which today we call smog or air pollution.
‘Reverence for nature’
The exhibition also highlights the pioneering environmental work of the lesser-known US scientist, inventor and women’s rights advocate Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888), whose 1856 publication Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays in The American Journal of Science and Arts, demonstrated that carbon dioxide (CO2) trapped heat, a climate-altering process she called the heat-trapping effect. Hers was the first recorded experiment showing the impact of CO2 emissions on what we now call climate change. But Foote’s research was mostly overlooked. Instead, British physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) received credit for the finding in a study published three years later. It remains unclear whether Tyndall was familiar with Foote’s work.
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Writers like the US author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) had also begun gathering his own measurements of changing river depths and detailed notations of flowering and bird appearances near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived.
But it has only become apparent in recent decades just how essential his observations can serve as comparison points between then and now. Witness on display, for example, Thoreau’s methodical charting of temperatures over the seasons at Walden Pond. More recently, climate change biologist Richard Primack has detailed in his Book, Walden Warming, the many flowers that are now blooming earlier today than in Thoreau’s time, due to rising temperatures.
While Thoreau’s data today is mostly being used for purposes of comparison, the author did himself express alarm at the damage caused by human intervention, says Karla Nielsen, exhibition curator and Huntington’s senior curator of literary collection. On his walks, “He would notice that the Merrimack’s course was being changed due to the factories on the river,” she tells the , because the dams built in connection with the mills disrupted the water’s natural, seasonal flow.
