METEOROLOGISTS have added another blessing to those they periodically count. Ever since METEOSAT-1 was launched in 1977, Ariane rockets have been used to propel our European weather spacecraft into orbit. Luckily, no weather satellites were aboard the ill fated Ariane-5 that came to grief on Tuesday the latest, METEOSAT-7, will not be launched until next year.
Had they suffered personal loss, weather people might well have been inclined to blame the ghost of Alfred Dreyfus, since he seems to hover on the periphery of our attempts to explore the upper atmosphere. Dreyfus, you will remember, was a young French army officer wrongly convicted of spying, and sentenced in 1894 to penal servitude for life on Devil's Island.
"L'affaire Dreyfus", as it came to be known, was the classic cause celebre, and the retrial that resulted in his vindication took place at Rennes in Brittany in September, 1899.
Those who remember what they read from time to time in Weather Eye may recall that on the day this second Dreyfus verdict was expected, a French scientist called Teisserenc de Bort was flying kites equipped with thermometers, attempting to measure temperatures in the upper air. As he was reeling in, the line snapped five miles of piano wire, with 11 kites attached, escaped to drift across the Parisian sky it fouled, and ultimately severed, all the telegraph lines from Brittany just at the time the Dreyfus verdict from Rennes was eagerly awaited by the outside world.
Now it so happens that l'Ile du Diable, or Devil's Island, where Dreyfus spent those five unhappy years, lies just off the coast of South America within sight, in fact, of Kourou in French Guiana from where Ariane was launched last Tuesday. It is an inhospitable spot, aptly described by Henri Charriere in his memoirs of the infamous penal colony. "The sun blazed down at noon a tropical sun that made your brains feel they were boiling in your skull a sun that shrivelled every plant that had not grown big enough to stand it a sun that made the air dance and tremble and a sun that dried out the shallow pools of sea water in a few hours, leaving nothing but a white film of salt."
One of the more evocative relics on Devil's Island nowadays is the bench on which the unfortunate Dreyfus used to sit looking out to sea towards the France that had rejected and disgraced him. Perhaps his ghost sat there last Tuesday, urging Nemesis in pursuit of these explorers of the upper world who had silenced the long awaited announcement of his vindication 97 years ago?