The shape of hurricanes: Lieutenant Colonel Reid’s morphology of cyclonic weather system

Within a generation of losing its American colonies, Britain adjusted to a new world order in which its power and influence was spread across the globe, slowly shifting focus from the Western Hemisphere to the East. Throughout its global empire, held together by the Royal Navy, much consolidation was needed in building and repairing garrisons, developing durable infrastructure and understanding exotic environments. Scattered around these fluid dominions were members of the Royal Engineers, the ‘Scientific Corps’ whose duties included designing public and military buildings and assembling useful data about the workings of nature in unfamiliar climates. This paper will follow Lieutenant Colonel William Reid RE, FRS, and his work on repairing and rebuilding structures damaged in the Barbados hurricane of 1831, his growing curiosity about these unpredictable storms and his collaborations with William C. Redfield in the United States and Henry Piddington in Calcutta investigating tropical tempests and their trajectories as circulating weather systems in the 1830s and 40s. Having established the workings of storms, trajectories could be predicted and communicated reliably by telegraphy when Reid’s theories became widely accepted