Mannheim is just a little down the road from where I live in Germany, and it was here, a little over 200 years ago, that one of the great adventures in meteorology began.
In the late 18th century Mannheim was the new capital of the Rhineland-Palatinate under the enlightened rule of the Elector Karl Theodor. With its opera house and orchestra and its renowned Academy, the city had developed into an influential centre of the arts and sciences.
Meanwhile, new possibilities had opened up in meteorology with the development of instruments for measuring many of the elements, and it was from Mannheim that their potential was tapped for the first time in the form of an organised network of weather observing stations.
Prompted by his shrewd advisers, Karl Theodor in 1781 established the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, more popularly known as the Mannheim Meteorological Society. The society's aims, however, were by no means parochial.
Its mission statement, as it were, included "finding skilled, industrious observers in appropriate places; inventing new instruments and improving those already in existence; collecting observations and translating these into Latin for general use; accompanying them with annotations for annual publication; and generally doing everything to promote the development of this still imperfect science".
Indeed, apart from translating observations into Latin, the aims of Societas Meteorologica Palatina were very similar to those of a modern meteorological service.
In 1782 letters were sent to 30 scientific institutions around Europe inviting them to contribute regular weather observations, conducted according to a prescribed standard practice, to the society's annual report, the Ephemerides Societatis Meteorologicae Palatinae.
We are told that no replies were received from the Vienna Astronomical Observatory, the Royal Society in London, or the Irish Academy in Dublin. One by one, however, the others responded, and the "Correspondents", as they were called, were invited to make thrice-daily observations of pressure, temperature, humidity, wind and rainfall for dispatch at monthly intervals to Mannheim.
This first attempt to organise meteorological observations on a systematic and collective basis lasted for a mere decade and a half. But at its peak the society was receiving regular reports from more than 50 observatories in a network stretching from Russia across western Europe to Greenland and North America. Written in Latin, the universal language of science at the time, the Ephemerides was published yearly until 1795, and comprises a unique collection of accurate weather reports.
The society was dissolved in 1799, but its legacy lives on. It has provided a wealth of weather data, upon which much of our knowledge of the climate of the late 18th century is based.