SCIENTIFIC WEATHER FORECASTING. 7 



article, and which had been printed years before they took 

 action in the matter. This lack of inter-communication, 

 and difficulties arising from the use of different languages, 

 should not be forgotten, because it makes many discoveries 

 really independent which, looked at chronologically, appear 

 successive. 



The first actual use of the electric telegraph for the 

 transmission of information respecting the weather seems 

 to have been in America, as Professor Henry, the Secretary 

 of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1849, personally requested 

 the telegraph companies to direct their operators to replace 

 in their regular morning despatches the signal "OK" (by 

 which they were accustomed to announce that their lines 

 were in order) by such words as " fair," "cloudy," etc., thus 

 giving without additional trouble, and as concisely as possible, 

 a summary of the condition of the weather at the different 

 stations, and which should be communicated to him (11). 



This, it will be noticed, was weather on/y, and no map 

 was made representing the information. Wind direction 

 was, we believe, not sent to Washington till 1858, and at 

 that date the information was marked on a large map by 

 moveable discs. 



Synchronously with Professor Henry's action in the 

 United States, or possibly slightly before it, Mr. Glaisher, 

 F.R.S., was organising, by the joint action of the Electric 

 Telegraph Company, the Railway Clearing House, and the 

 proprietors of the Daily News, a really scientific system in 

 this country. Furnished with a pass over nearly every 

 railway in the country, he went to all the terminal stations 

 of the Electric Telegraph Company, and to many of the 

 intermediate ones, determined a meridian line for each and 

 instructed the clerks as to observing the direction of the 

 wind, and reporting the state of the weather. 



The first publication was in the Daily News of 14th 

 June, 1 849, when a table was inserted giving the direction and 

 strength of the wind and the state of the weather at thirteen 

 stations, and the following footnote. "As explained elsewhere^ 

 the very extensive arrangements for making this table com- 

 plete have not yet been concluded. In a short time we shall 

 ^ But no such explanation can be found. 



