JOSEPH HENRY Father of Weather Service By
Frank Rives Millikan Storm warnings, daily weather
forecasts, and weather maps seem so much a part of modern life that it is
hard to imagine a world without them. But when the Smithsonian was founded in
1846, there was no central agency to provide timely data on the weather, and
people had to rely on an annual almanac. Joseph Henry helped shape the
world we know when he laid the foundation of a national weather service
shortly after becoming the Smithsonian's first Secretary. Henry's interest in meteorology
dated to his days as a professor at the Albany Academy in Albany, New York,
where he compiled reports of statewide meteorological observations for the
University of the State of New York. As a professor of natural philosophy
(physics) at the College of New Jersey (Princeton), he conducted research on
lightning and engaged in discussions with pioneer meteorologists both in the
United States and Britain about storm patterns and atmospheric physics. When Henry came to the
Smithsonian, one of his first priorities was to set up a meteorological
program. In 1847, while outlining his plan for the new institution, Henry
called for "a system of extended meteorological observations for solving
the problem of American storms." By 1849, he had budgeted $1,000 for the
Smithsonian meteorological project and established a network of some 150
volunteer weather observers. A decade later, the project had more than 600
volunteer observers, including people in Canada, Mexico, Latin America, and
the Caribbean. Its cost in 1860 was $4,400, or thirty percent of the
Smithsonian's research and publication budget. The Smithsonian supplied
volunteers with instructions, standardized forms, and, in some cases, with
instruments. They submitted monthly reports that included several
observations per day of temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, wind and
cloud conditions, and precipitation amounts. They also were asked to comment
on "casual phenomena," such as thunderstorms, hurricanes,
tornadoes, earthquakes, meteors, and auroras. Enlisting enthusiastic volunteers
proved less of a problem than interpreting their observations. In 1856, Henry
contracted with James H. Coffin, a professor of mathematics and natural
philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, to carry out this
task. Coffin, who received as many as half-a-million separate observations in
a year, complained that some contained "new-coined characters &
hieroglyphics" that made them unintelligible. He also had to employ up
to fifteen human "computers" to help make the necessary arithmetical
calculations. In 1861, he finally published the first of a two- volume
compilation of climatic data and storm observations based on the volunteers'
reports for the years 1854 through 1859.
A second aspect of Henry's
meteorological project was weather telegraphy. Early on, Henry foresaw the
storm-warning potential of the telegraph, an invention he had pioneered himself in the
1830s and that Samuel Morse had made commercially feasible by 1845. Realizing
that storms in the United States generally moved from west to east, he wrote
in the Smithsonian's 1847 annual report that "the extended lines of telegraph
will furnish a ready means of warning the more northern and eastern observers
to be on the watch for the first appearance of an advancing storm." By 1849, Henry worked out an
arrangement with a number of telegraph companies to allow free transmission
of local weather data to the Smithsonian. He also proposed to supply
"the most important stations" with barometers and thermometers. By
1857, telegraph stations from New Orleans to New York were cooperating. These dispatches enabled Henry to
devise a large daily weather map. Its purpose, Henry wrote, was "to show
at one view the meteorological condition of the atmosphere over the whole
country." The map, which Henry mounted in
1856 for public display in the Castle, was dotted with colored discs. As
telegraph reports came in each morning, an assistant placed white discs in
locations with fair weather, blue ones where snow fell, black where there was
rain, and brown where conditions were cloudy. Arrows on the discs showed the
direction of prevailing winds. The map became a popular
attraction. Henry noted that tourists who viewed it "all appear to be specially interested in knowing the condition of weather
to which their friends at home are subjected at the time." He shared the
telegraph dispatches with the Washington Evening Star, which, in
May 1857, began publishing daily weather conditions at nearly twenty
different cities. Henry thus helped give rise to the popular newspaper
weather page. Henry's map also made some
forecasting possible. "If a black card is seen in the morning on the
station at Cincinnati, indicating rain at that city," he noted, "a
rain storm may confidently be expected at Washington at about seven o'clock
in the evening." This rule-of-thumb proved reliable enough for Henry to
postpone evening lectures at the Smithsonian on days Cincinnati had morning
rain. Henry apparently envisioned a
system of storm warnings, announcing in his annual report for 1857 that he
hoped the following year to arrange with telegraph lines "to give
warning on the eastern coast of the approach of storms." But he was not
able to implement the plan before the Civil War engulfed the nation. The war dealt a major blow to the
meteorological project. Henry wrote in 1861 that the project "suffered
more from the disturbed condition of the country than any other part of the
operations of the Smithsonian establishment." Urgent public business
forced weather information off the telegraph lines, and secession cut Henry
off from his southern observers. Although he was able to revive the project
after the war, Henry began taking steps to transfer its operations to the
federal government. In his annual report for 1865,
Henry called for the federal government to establish a national weather
service capable of issuing storm warnings and other weather predictions.
Others urged similar proposals, and in 1870 Congress passed a bill that put
storm and weather predictions in the hands of the U.S. Army's Signal Service.
By 1874, Henry convinced the Signal Service to take over the volunteer
observer system as well. The weather functions of the
Signal Service were transferred in 1891 to the newly established U.S. Weather
Bureau, which later became the National Weather Service. That service today,
as David Laskin puts it in his 1996 book Braving
the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather, "still adheres
to the same fundamental structure and principles that Joseph Henry devised and
set in motion." [For more on Henry's interest in
meteorology, see Frank Millikan, "Joseph Henry's Grand Meteorological
Crusade," Weatherwise 50
(October/November 1997): 14-18.] ©1997-2007
by the Smithsonian Institution |