The First Weather Forecasts

Today, weather forecasts are so common that it is easy to forget they are a fairly recent invention. One of the first people to publish them regularly was Robert FitzRoy, a British naval officer who had earlier commanded the ship that carried Charles Darwin around the world. In 1854, FitzRoy was put in charge of a new government office created to collect weather data at sea.

In 1859, a violent storm sank more than a hundred ships off the coast of Britain, and hundreds of people died. FitzRoy believed that many of these deaths could have been prevented. He organized a network of coastal stations that sent weather reports to London by telegraph, which allowed him to follow storms as they moved across the country. Using these reports, he began sending storm warnings to ports, and in 1861 a London newspaper started printing his daily “forecasts” — a word he himself introduced.

The forecasts were popular with the public, but they were not always accurate, and newspapers often mocked FitzRoy when they were wrong. After his death in 1865, the government stopped publishing them. The storm warnings, however, were soon brought back, because sailors and ship owners complained that they had become too valuable to lose.