Inigo Owen Jones (1 December 1872 - 14 November 1954) was a meteorologist and farmer. He was born in
Croydon,
Surrey,
England to Owen Jones a civil engineer and a descendant of the architect
Inigo Jones. His mother was from the
Bernoulli family of mathematicians, and Inigo attributed his interest in metereology and astronomy to this background.
In 1874 Jones's parents migrated to
Australia, settling on a property called Crohamhurst in the
Glass House Mountains north of
Brisbane in eastern Queensland. He became interested in meteorology while working on the family farm. The
Queensland Government metereologist
Clement Lindley Wragge was so impressed with Inigo's ability as a schoolboy that he recruited him as an assistant in 1888.
He was for many years a synodsman of the Brisbane diocese of the Church of England.
Jones studied the variation in
sunspot cycles that had been discovered by Edouard Bruckner, and came to the conclusion that anomalies were caused by the interaction of the planets
Jupiter,
Saturn,
Uranus and
Neptune. This became the basis of his long-range weather forecasts, although he never claimed to be able to make day-to-day predictions. Although Jones failed to have his methods recognised as soundly based, by any substantial body of accredited scientific opinion he was widely recognised for his successes, especially by farmers.
Inigo Jones became a full-time forecaster and lecturer in 1927 and founded the privately operated Crohamhurst Observatory in south-east......
Read More