Laura Hoffman,age 10, of Jefferson, Wisconsin, for her question:
When was the U.S. Weather Bureau started?
In colonial days, a few people here and there kept scanty records of the weather. Some of these old reports are preserved as valuable items in our museums. But organizing a nation wide system of weather watching, was a huge job. It grew step by step and it. still is improving.
The weather is important to almost everyone. Farmers need to know what to expect from the skies and those who sail ships and boats need to be prepared for stormy gales. Crowded cities need advance warning of hurricanes and tornadoes, and all of us want a forecast of the weather when we plan a picnic or a vacation trip. In the modern age we take all this for granted and as a rule the official reports for tomorrow's weather turn out to be fairly accurate. But this nation wide convenience depends upon a very complicated system. The central Weather Bureau that figures the forecasts was not easy to arrange and the big job took almost half a century.
The Congress established our present Weather Bureau on July 1, 1891. It was set up as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But on July 30 of 1940, Congress transferred the Weather Bureau to the Department of Commerce. The Bureau as we know it is almost 77 years old. But many steps were needed to work out the organization to its present form.
One of the first steps goes back more than 100 years to 1849. At that time, Professor Henry of the Smithsonian Institution started making charts and weather maps. He was able to get information from far flung parts of the country by means of the newly invented telegraph. It is easy to see how important the telegraph was in early forecasting. If a message about oncoming weather had to be carried by a horse and rider, chances are the weather itself might come blowing in from the west long before the rider arrived on the scene to tell about it.
Professor Henry's system continued in operation until the Civil War, when his forecasting network was maintained by wartime conditions. After the war, the system could not be revived successfully. But by 1870, what with Americans spreading out from coast to cost and railroads a building to link every part of the country, the need for a good weather service once again came to the fore. And in that year, Congress passed a law handing over the nationwide job to the U.S. Army Signal Co. For the next 20 years, the Signal Corps ran the U.S. Weather Service. In 1891, it was time to organize the work into the National Weather Bureau.
Our Weather Bureau gathers its facts from thousands of scattered stations, and from ships at sea. Since the weather ignores boundaries between nations, the Bureau exchanges weather data with far flung countries around the world. Experts still do not understand all about the weather and some of its tricks take them by surprise. But the Space Age has added a new gadget to help them. We now have weather satellites orbiting the earth, sending down pictures and other data gathered from the weathery atmosphere surrounding the whole world.