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"What hath God wrought?" remarked Samuel F. B. Morse when he successfully transmitted the first telegraphic message in 1844. Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow and this is the Weather Notebook.

Morse's question was not lost on meteorologists of the day. Here, they realized, was a device almost tailor made for their most pressing concerns: communicating storm warnings in a timely manner and getting simultaneous readings of conditions from a large geographical area. Meteorologically, the telegraph was heaven-sent.

Thanks to a visionary scientist named Joseph Henry, the application of telegraphy to meteorology quickly became a reality ­ at least a partial reality. As the first director of the newly established Smithsonian Institution in 1846, Henry made "weather by wire" one of his top priorities. His plan was to have telegraph offices nationwide wire reports of local conditions to the Smithsonian each morning and to use these readings to update a daily weather map. The major glitch was sparse data: in 1853 only 32 stations were participating, and by the outbreak of the Civil War, the Smithsonian network had a mere 45 widely scattered stations, most of them located east of the Mississippi.

Still, it was a start. Indeed, it was more than a start. Weather by wire was the crucial break with the past, and the first step into a future of remote sensing and electronic data transmission. Today, as we log on to the Internet to check the forecast in Katmandu, we should remember that Samuel Morse and Joseph Henry were there long before us.

Thanks today to Seattle resident and writer David Laskin. And thanks also to Subaru and the National Science foundation for their generous support of the Weather Notebook.