The Dueling Weathermen of the 1800s

In 1800 the weather remained a mystery. The sky was the last part of nature to be classified: a relic of the arcane, chaotic world that had existed before Newton and the Scientific Revolution.

Very few in scientific circles would have heard of William C. Redfield’s name before the publication of his storm paper in 1831. A New York businessman, he had made his name with his Steam Navigation Company. Redfield’s steamers plied up and down the Hudson, from New York to Albany, carrying passengers and freight. Redfield’s success had come through his natural instinct for innovation. In the 1820s, the early years of steam, passengers had been wary of traveling too close to the engines, worried that they might explode—as they often did. Redfield’s solution to the problem had been simple but effective. He had designed “safety barges” for the passengers to travel in, precursors of the railway carriages of the future, drawn in strings behind the steamer. Over time, as safety standards had improved and passengers had become more confident, he had switched his tactics: moving the passengers back into the steamer and filling the barges with cargo.

But Redfield was more than a wily businessman. He had worked as a mechanic in his youth in small-town Connecticut, and he had retained his interest in engineering. He relished the challenge of invention and was often involved in the innovation of his steamers, striving to produce his own simpler, cheaper, and safer forms of apparatus. In time, others had come to appreciate the quality of Redfield’s work. He was that rare blend: a businessman with the knack of getting things done, and an inventor with an independent mind and a Yankee love of detail.

Traveling on a steamer from New York to New Haven one day in 1831 Redfield chanced to meet Denison Olmstead, professor of mathematics and physics at Yale. Spotting Olmstead on deck he had approached and “modestly asked leave to make a few inquiries” about a paper Olmstead had recently published on hailstorms in the American Journal of Science. Soon Olmstead and Redfield were talking about storms and it was then, for the first time, that Redfield unveiled his theory of whirling winds. It was a pivotal moment in the history of meteorology.

The whole mechanics of a storm could be reproduced in any house in America at any time, with apparatus no more sophisticated than a cup of water and a spoon.

Redfield had devised this idea a decade before, after the “Great September Gale of 1821.” The gale—as the hurricane was then called—had sparked panic right along the northeastern coast, causing a storm surge that had flooded the New Jersey coastline as well as several streets on Manhattan Island. In the days afterward Redfield had been out walking with his son in rural Connecticut, which had been equally affected. He noticed that near Middletown, in the center of the state, trees had been blown over toward the north-west. But in neighboring Massachusetts the trees had fallen in the opposite direction, pointing toward the southeast. Redfield took this as proof that in just 70 miles the winds had reversed direction. To check his facts, he had collected newspaper reports and soon had sketched the path of the storm. It was then that, in Olmstead’s words, “the idea flashed upon his mind that the storm was a progressive whirl-wind.”

Not having any connection to the scientific establishment, Redfield kept his ideas to himself until his chance meeting with Olmstead in 1831. Intrigued, Olmstead persuaded him to write an article on the subject for the American Journal of Science. Redfield agreed, on the condition that Olmstead revise the manuscript and oversee its production. Several months later, Redfield’s article was published.

It was this confusion, Redfield announced, that he set out to explain. Using the September Gale of 1821, he presented his case like a prosecution barrister: noting where the storm had been at a specific time, revealing details of where the winds were blowing. He supported his claims throughout. “If our position be conceded then it is no longer difficult to explain the paradox, or mystery, which otherwise pertains to the phenomena exhibited by this storm ... We can discern the reason why, in seamen’s phrase, ‘a north-wester will never remain long in debt to a south-easter.’ ” He showed that the gale had begun in the West Indies on September 1, then had curled up along the coast, over Charleston in South Carolina and then Norfolk in Virginia and Delaware before