President Ulysses Grant signed a joint resolution directing the Secretary of War to establish stations for collecting and reporting weather observations, largely intended to protect shipping on the Great Lakes and Atlantic coast. The system, run initially by Army officers, evolved over subsequent decades into the civilian U.S. Weather Bureau.
In the decades before radio and telegraph-linked observation networks, storms on the Great Lakes and Atlantic seaboard killed sailors and destroyed cargo with little warning. Insurance losses and public outcry over shipwrecks pushed Congress to act, and the resulting resolution placed responsibility for weather observation under the Army Signal Service, reasoning that only the military possessed the discipline and telegraph infrastructure to coordinate reports nationally.
Brigadier General Albert J. Myer, head of the Signal Service, built a network of observers who used standardized instruments and the telegraph to transmit synchronized readings from dozens of stations to Washington, where forecasters, derisively nicknamed 'Old Probabilities,' issued storm warnings.
The military-run system eventually proved too focused on Signal Corps priorities, and Congress transferred forecasting duties to a new civilian agency, the U.S. Weather Bureau, in 1890, itself the ancestor of today's National Weather Service. Though the exact bill's date of passage is sometimes cited differently across sources, its consequences were unambiguous: it marked the first time any national government committed sustained resources to scientific weather prediction as a public service.
Key people: Ulysses S. Grant, Albert J. Myer