This is the story of our greatest obsession: a gripping account of the sailors, scientists and inventors who sought to understand the weather

Long-listed for PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History 2016.

"Richly researched, exciting... It is both scientific and cultural history, of prizewinning potential and as fresh and exhilerating throughout as a strong sea breeze." -- James McConnachie Sunday Times "Superbly researched and grippingly written... Moore is at least as interested in the personalities and their rivalries, and the sheer spendour and catastrophies of weather itself - storms and shipwrecks, heatwaves and floods (all vividly described) - as by the science. And he weaves it together, deftly picking up threads left dangling in earlier chapters, darting across continents, embracing swashbuckling sea captains and fastidious bureaucrats, penny-pinching politians and mad inventors, with as sharp an eye for eccentricity, absurdity and tragedy as for genius. The result is a panorama of the entire Victorian era." -- Richard Morrison The Times "The Weather Experiment is a genuinely gripping read and demonstrates how scientific ideas can come ahead of the time" -- Gavin Pretor, 4 stars Mail on Sunday "Moore is the rare science writer who can describe dew point so poetically you feel you're with him in a twinkling field of white clover on a cool summer morning... Evocative and full of wisdom for modern times." -- New York Times Book Review "The Weather Experiment is not the first book to have been written about FitzRoy...but Moore's achievement is to imbue him and his work with palpable narrative life, while surrounding him with a large supporting cast of contemporaries" The Times Literary Supplement

Peter Moore is a writer, freelance journalist and lecturer. He teaches creative non-fiction at City University and lives in London. His first book, Damn His Blood, an acclaimed history of a rural murder in 1806, was published in 2012. www.peter-moore.co.uk. @petermoore.