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; however, Inigo Jones never married and there are no records of descendants. 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.
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 planetsJupiter, 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 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.
