A COLONIAL WEATHER SERVICE. 331 



A COLONIAL WEATHER SERVICE. 



BY ALEXANDER McADIE, M. A. 



THE Signal Service was thoroughly organized as a meteoro- 

 logical 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. Forecast- 

 ing weather changes had, however, been suggested earlier than 

 the date above given. It is said that the French war office, dur- 

 ing the siege of Sevastopol, sent to the allied fleets before the for- 

 tress 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 unique 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 correspond- 

 ent, 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 re- 

 markable 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.* 



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. 



