Jefferson and Weather
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Thomas Jefferson was not only a Founding Father of the American government, but a founding great-great grandfather of our national weather service, or at least the principle on which it's based.

I'm Dave Thurlow and this is the Weather Notebook.

Jefferson was as dedicated to meteorology as he was to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He dreamed of setting up a weather observation network in which one person in every county would take twice daily readings at dawn and again at 4 PM. Jefferson never saw this project fufilled, but a rudimentary weather network was implemented in 1814 when army surgeon general James Tilton ordered all army hospital surgeons to "keep a diary of the weather."

Jefferson's dream finally became a partial reality in the mid-19th century. That's when Joseph Henry, director of the fledgling Smithsonian Institution, established the first uniform nationwide weather observation network. Henry had one critical advantage that made the network vastly more valuable for forecasters than Jefferson's original scheme: the telegraph.

By 1860, telegraph operators from Burlington, Vermont to St. Louis, Missouri were wiring daily observations of local conditions to Washington, DC. It was there that the readings were posted on a large map displayed in the great hall of the Smithsonian castle. When Congress authorized the funding for a national weather service in 1870, the principle of basing forecasts on simultaneous daily observations was firmly in place.

Certainly there have been some bumps on the road between "weather by wire" and the World Wide Web - but the foundation imagined by Jefferson and implemented by Joseph Henry has remained intact.

Thanks today to writer David Laskin. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory, underwritten by Subaru of American and the National Science Foundation.