The First Weather Forecasts

[A] Predicting the weather requires knowing what the weather is doing somewhere else, and for most of history that information travelled no faster than a horse. A storm reaching the coast of England had usually crossed the Atlantic days earlier, but nobody on land could have known. [B] The electric telegraph changed the arithmetic overnight: a message could now outrun the weather it described.

[C] Robert FitzRoy, who had captained the ship that carried Darwin around the world, set up a network of coastal stations in the 1860s that telegraphed readings of pressure and wind to London each morning. From these he issued what he called forecasts — a word he coined to signal that they were reasoned estimates rather than prophecies. [D] Ships were warned by signal cones hoisted at harbour mouths, and the number of lives saved was large enough to be noticed. The reception was hostile all the same. Newspapers mocked the failures, and a committee of scientists concluded that the theory behind the work was too thin to justify the confidence placed in it. They were not entirely wrong; FitzRoy was working largely on pattern and instinct. But the service he built was restored within a few years of being shut down, because the fishing fleets had come to depend on it.