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Blue Hill 2
Wed Dec 15, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, Executive Director Charles
Orloff tells some stories about America’s oldest weather observatory, at Blue Hill,
Mass.
CO: Abbot Laurence Rotch brought a friend of his, Henry Clayton. And they came
across a young man named Fergusson.
BY: Fergusson was tasked to invent a windlass to launch weather kites, and pay them
out on piano wire.
CO: They first though they would go up a thousand, maybe two thousand feet. They
ended up, after two or three years of doing this, of launching kites up to 15,000
feet—three miles into the atmosphere. That would use approximately seven miles of
piano wire. And they would fly them for upwards of 24, 48 hours before they started
cranking them back in, which would take another half a day to bring them all back in.
BY: And for the trivia buff:
CO: Blue Hill Observatory held the Guinness Book’s of Records single highest kite
flight ever in the world for over a hundred years. It took a group from Canada the better
part of 10 years to break that record, and that was only done two years ago.
BY: And the Blue Hill record?
CO: 12,000 feet with a single kite.
CO: Probably the most exciting weather day occurred in 1938 during the great
hurricane. John Connifer, who was the observer, sent his son running down the hill
with the friend to get out of there. The wind at that point rose to over 120 miles an hour
for five minutes sustained—never went under that—and peaked at 186 miles an hour.
BY: Even the barometers at Blue Hill are historic—the oldest in America.
CO: The official barometer of the observatory was brought by Rotch on a boat in 1887.
And it’s a regular 30-inch mercury barometer that was made in England.
Tomorrow—running Blue Hill. Our show is funded by Subaru of America.
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