The Beaufort Scale One of the most beautiful pieces of accidental poetry I've ever heard.→[More:]

This 110 word piece of descriptive writing was created by the Irish naval commander Sir Francis Beaufort in the early 1800s for the purpose of measuring the intensity of the wind conditions at open sea. (It was not actually written by Beaufort, but rather by a panel of hydrographers.) Beaufort was obsessed with observing things and communicating to others what the world looked like. He was well-known for his minutely detailed journals, and became one the greatest scientific networker of his time. Beaufort was tapped to lead the search for a naturalist in the 1830s to accompany the crew of the Beagle, and it was he who recommended Charles Darwin.

The scale is so accurate and failsafe that weather historians are actually able to go back over naval records from the period and create an extremely accurate weather history. Scott Huler admires it so much that he has written a book about it, Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a 19th-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry.

I haven't read the book yet, but it sounds fascinating. In it, Huler addresses how the language we use to describe our world as it is an exhortation to observe it more closely. It also breaks down the scale's literary beauty line by line. For example, the first clause about the fresh breeze is iambic tetrameter and the second trochaic pentameter. Check it out:

Small trees in leaf begin to sway,
(da DA da DA da DA da DA)
crested wavelets form on inland waters
(DA da DA da DA da DA da DA da)

So, does anyone listen to the Shipping Forecasts broadcast on BBC Radio 4?