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Law of Storms
10/09/2002
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Back in the first half of the 19th century,
Americans flocked to public lectures for enlightenment and entertainment on the burning issues
of the day -- one of which was weather.
The quest to discover "the law of storms" -- the idea that a single phenomenon accounted for
the violence in the atmosphere -- was a prime mover of 19th century meteorology, and
scientists thundered away on the lecture circuit defending their theories and debunking their
rivals. This controversy came to a head in the ongoing debate between the mathematician James
Pollard Espy and the naturalist William Redfield.
Redfield, a New England native, became obsessed with tropical storms in 1821 when he observed
what a hurricane did to the Connecticut forests. After a decade spent poring over historical
accounts and pondering the workings of the atmosphere, Redfield concluded that hurricanes took
the form of great vortices rotating about a central eye, and that the violence of the winds
caused air pressure to drop and torrential rain to fall. Not bad for 1821.
The more learned James Espy -- who was known as the Storm King because he studied weather --
disagreed. He claimed that rising air and the resulting condensation alone accounted for rain,
hail, snow, winds and air pressure changes.
So, who won the debate? Well, nobody really. So even though neither of these great thinkers
figured everything out about the laws governing storms the highly publicized debate they
created in the 1830s and 1840s unquestionably gave meteorology a nudge in the right direction.
Thanks to today's contributing writer David Laskin, Subaru of America, and the National
Science Foundation. Our website is a pretty neat place- www.weathernotebook.org.
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