Inigo Owen Jones

Inigo Owen Jones (1 December 1872 – 14 November 1954) was a meteorologist and farmer in Queensland, Australia.

For information about the British architect, see Inigo Jones.

Inigo and Marion Jones in their garden at Crohamhurst, ca 1935

Early life

Inigo Owen Jones was born in Croydon, Surrey, England to Owen Jones a civil engineer. It has been claimed Inigo Owen Jones is descended from the architect Inigo Jones;[1][2] however, the latter never married and there are no records of descendants.[3] His mother was from the Bernoulli family of mathematicians, and Inigo attributed his interest in meteorology and astronomy to this background. Upon his death, his cousin, Archibald Bernoulli of Melbourne, a direct descendant of the Bernoulli family, placed a notice in The Argus newspaper in Melbourne.

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.

He was for many years a synodsman of the Brisbane diocese of the Church of England. Inigo married Marion Emma Comrie at Crohamhurst on 11 January 1905.[4]

Meteorology

The Queensland Government meteorologist Clement Lindley Wragge was so impressed with Inigo's ability as a schoolboy that he recruited him as an assistant in 1888.

Jones studied the variation in sunspot cycles that had been discovered by Eduard 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 Queensland. An Australian Senate hearing was told in 1938 that Jones was a "wonderful patriot" and that he was "held in the highest esteem by the big man and also the small man on the land".

At the 11 January 1939 meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) his ideas on cyclical variations theory was severely discredited, especially by Edward Kidson, the New Zealand government meteorologist, and yet farmers credited and worked their farms using his long-range forecasts.

Later life

Jones died at home on his farm at Crohamhurst, Queensland and was buried in the nearby Peachester cemetery.[4]

Legacy

His assistant Lennox Walker expanded Jones' theories and continued marketing long range forecasts until 2000, when he passed the business over to his own son Hayden Walker.

His Crohamhurst Observatory was listed on the Queensland Heritage Register in 2008.[5]

References
  1. Steele, John (1983). "Jones, Inigo Owen (1872–1954)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  2. "Obituary – Inigo Owen Jones – Obituaries Australia". oa.anu.edu.au. Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  3. "Inigo Jones was a Seventeenth Century architect". Retrieved 11 January 2018.
  4. Steele, John (1983). "Jones, Inigo Owen (1872–1954)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Retrieved 18 July 2017.
  5. "Crohamhurst Observatory (former) (entry 602682)". Queensland Heritage Register. Queensland Heritage Council. Retrieved 1 August 2014.

Sources

Media related to Inigo Owen Jones at Wikimedia Commons

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