| A COLONIAL WEATHER SERVICE. |
By ALEXANDER McADIE, M. A.
THE Signal Service was thoroughly organized as a meteorological body in November, 1870. As Americans we are justly proud of the work accomplished by it and its immediate successor the Weather Bureau. Toward the establishment and success of the meteorological service the army, the navy, and civil life contributed representative men: Myer, the soldier physician, dubbed by his countrymen "Old Probs"; Maury, the seaman whose pen could trace on many pages descriptions ever pleasing and instructive; and Ferrel, citizen professor amid military men, one so diffident and reserved that he carried to and from the meetings of the National Academy, of which he was a member, manuscripts of problems solved, which he would have liked to make known but that a strange shyness prevented. Forecasting weather changes had, however, been suggested earlier than the date above given. It is said that the French war office, during the siege of Sevastopol, sent to the allied fleets before the fortress information that a tempest was raging west of the Crimean Peninsula. In the United States, Redfield, Espy, Coffin, Loomis, Henry, and Lapham had argued the possibility of forecasting weather changes if systematic simultaneous observations could be had. Antedating all of these stands that uniquer philosopher, the printer of Philadelphia, who had discovered, before the middle of the eighteenth century, that "our northeast storms come from the northwest." Before Franklin, however, came his correspondent. Dr. John Lining, of Charleston, S. C, who kept a record of the daily temperature in 1738. Thermometers had then been in use but a few years. But the observations which were the most remarkable of all, and which up to the present time have been unnoticed if not indeed unknown, were made in Virginia about the time of the Revolution. The observers were James Madison, styled by that charming old traveler, the Marquis de Chastellux, "an eminent professor of mathematics"; and Thomas Jefferson, the Sage of Monticello. One was at Williamsburg, the colonial capital, practically near the sea; the other at Monticello, one hundred and twenty miles west and north, practically in the mountains.[1]
These two colonial gentlemen operated a weather service; on a small scale it is true, but the observers seem to have clearly recognized that great underlying principle of all modern weather
- ↑ A voluminous correspondence between the two is on file in the State Department, access to which was kindly granted by the Secretary of State.
