President Ulysses S. Grant signs a bill creating what we now call the National Weather Service.
It had been obvious for centuries that weather in North America generally moves from west to east or from southwest to northeast. But other than looking upwind, you couldn’t use that knowledge to predict the weather. You needed to move weather reports downwind faster than the weather itself was moving. The telegraph (see here) finally made that possible. In 1849, the Smithsonian Institution began supplying weather instruments to telegraph companies. Volunteer observers submitted observations to the Smithsonian, which tracked the movement of storms across the country.
Several states established their own weather services, but Congress thought the nation needed a centralized weather office with military precision. The War Department assigned the new function to the Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce. The network went online on November 1, 1870. At 7:35 a.m., observers at twenty-four stations in the eastern United States began taking synchronized readings and telegraphing them to the division’s headquarters in Washington, DC. To head the unit, the U.S. Army hired Cleveland Abbe, a private forecaster who (his name notwithstanding) operated out of Cincinnati. He made his first official forecasts in February 1871.
A forecast looked like this:
Probabilities: It is probable that the low pressure in Missouri will make itself felt decidedly tomorrow with northerly winds and clouds on the lakes, and brisk southerly winds on the Gulf.
The weather division was renamed the U.S. Weather Bureau and transferred to civilian control as part of the Agriculture Department in 1891. President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved it to the Commerce Department in 1940.
The bureau was renamed the National Weather Service in 1970, when it joined the Commerce Department’s newly created National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.—RA