We take a great deal for granted when we flip on the radio, turn on the television or boot up a computer or cell phone to check the weather. It wasn’t always that easy. In fact, when you research it a bit, you find that the history of weather reporting is deep, but the handy resources only date back to the inventions cited above.
Samuel Morse gave us our first taste of modern communication with his telegraph in 1832. In the nearly two hundred years since, our means of weather reporting has increased exponentially.
As with most public notification systems, weather forecasts were encouraged and sponsored at the federal level. What is surprising is the genesis of such programs. According to the NOAA website, The National Weather Service had its beginnings in the early history of the United States. Weather has always been important to the citizenry of this country, and this was especially true during the 17th and 18th centuries.
The beginning of the National Weather Service we know today started on February 9th, 1870, when President Ulysses S. Grant signed a joint resolution of Congress authorizing the Secretary of War to establish a national weather service. This resolution required the Secretary of War.
Later that year, the first systematized, synchronous weather observations ever taken in the U.S. were made by “observing-sergeants” of the Army Signal Service at 22 stations and telegraphed to Washington. An agency was born which would affect the daily lives of most of the citizens of the United States through its forecasts and warnings.
For most of us who vividly remember the local weather since the 1950s, voices such as Fred Heckman on WIBC come to mind. Later, Mike Ahern of Channel 8 in Indianapolis was a familiar figure for the Indianapolis CBS affiliate station. Doppler Radar is so much a part of our vocabulary that we probably never give a thought to how it developed. Oddly enough, it heralds from the first inklings of what we know as the handy way of spotting objects out of our line of sight.
My sources confirm that some of this history is attributed to a European scientist. German Heinrich Hertz (1857 -1894) calculated that an electric current swinging very rapidly back and forth in a conducting wire would radiate electromagnetic waves into the surrounding space (a modern antenna). In 1886, Hertz created such a wire and detected such oscillations in his lab, using an electric spark, in which the current oscillates rapidly, explaining how lightning creates its characteristic crackling noise on the radio! Today we term these oscillations “radio waves”. Earlier, science dubbed them “Hertzian waves”. Today, in recognition of his work, the unit of frequency of a radio wave – one cycle per second – is named the hertz, measuring frequencies in Hertz (Hz), oscillations per second and megahertz (MHz) for radio frequencies.
Hertz built on the work of James Clerk Maxwell, who predicted the existence of radio waves. Hertz was the first to demonstrate experimentally the production and detection of Maxwell’s waves. This discovery led directly to radio.
According to official sources, six years later, another major development came from a British laboratory when determined Scottish physicist Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt (1892–1973) developed the radar locating of aircraft in England. In 1917, while at the British Meteorological Office, he designed devices to locate thunderstorms.
Watson-Watt was the man who coined the phrase “ionosphere” in 1926. Appointed as the director of radio research at the British National Physical Laboratory in 1935, he completed research to enable the military to locate aircraft. Watson-Watt’s other contributions include a cathode-ray direction finder used to study atmospheric phenomena, research in electromagnetic radiation, and inventions used for flight safety. While many may guess that radar is a fairly recent invention, the paperwork tells another story. Modern radar dates to a 1935 British patent.
The term “Doppler” is so familiar to children today that they don’t give it a second thought. Like the inventions when we were kids and unknown when our parents were young, Doppler positions itself as an integral part of current meteorology — but do you know its origin? Again, go to the sources!
Doppler RADAR dates to a man named Christian Andreas Doppler. In 1842, Doppler was an Austrian physicist who first described how the observed frequency of light and sound waves was affected by the relative motion of the source and the detector. This phenomenon became known as the Doppler effect.
Most often demonstrated by the change in the sound wave of a passing train, the train whistle’s sound becomes “higher” in pitch as it approaches and “lower” in pitch as it moves away.
Children are rarely treated to a first-hand experience of a passing train. More’s the pity. Our childhood memories reaffirm the plaintive, questing call of the chugging engine that fired our imaginations as we lay in bed and heard the engineer’s call as he passed county roads and city streets. The destination of those trains inspired us to travel beyond our neighborhoods or farms and see the country for ourselves.
As for the sounds of the whistle, scientists explain it this way. Frequency is the number of sound waves reaching the ear in a given amount of time and it determines the tone, or pitch, perceived. The tone remains the same as long as you are not moving.
As the train moves closer, the number of sound waves reaching your ear in a given amount of time increases — so the pitch increases. As the train moves away, the opposite happens. I wish more children experienced simple explanations of physics. That knowledge could open doors for them that could lead to tremendous inventions in the future.
Weather. It might be a daily concern, but the science within meteorology hints at a deeper theme. Change — not only in the weather itself, but also in the science of weather. Sonograms enable parents-to-be to see their unborn, but that would not have been possible without a man named Robert Rines. His interests might pique your interest as well, because he not only invented high definition radar and the sonogram, he was also a patent attorney, the founder of the Franklin Pierce Law Center and a chaser of the Loch Ness monster.
The next time you rush to the TV after hearing a major storm alert or tune in that car or truck radio for the latest update, remember those stalwart individuals who used their “gray matter” to come up with the inventions that so enhance our lives today. May science change as swiftly as the weather. If it does, we will all be better for it.