In December 1869, the improbably named Dr. Increase Lapham read a stunning report in his local newspaper.
On the8th of that month, "The Milwaukee Sentinel published a list of 1,914 vessels, valued at $4,100,000, that had been lost on the Great Lakes in the year 1869, with loss of 209 lives of sailors and passengers."
Lapham had long known that weather on the Great Lakes was dangerous and posed a major threat to the ships and passengers that traveled on them. Yet, before that report, he hadn't seen the statistics summarized so strikingly. He knew something had to be done.
So, he wrote to Congress. It was far from the first time that Lapham had raised his concerns about studying the weather. In the long letter he composed, though, he suggested the use of a technology that had only recently come into common use: the telegraph.
Lapham's proposal was notably ambitious and elaborate in scale, at least in comparison to any weather observation systems that had come before.
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He wrote, "Now, it is quite clear that if we could have the services of a competent meteorologist at some suitable place on the Lakes with the aid of a sufficient corps of observers with compared instruments at stations located every 200 or 300 miles toward the west, and the cooperation of the telegraph companies, the origin and progress of these great storms could be fully traced, their velocity and direction of motion ascertained, their destructive force and other characteristics noted — all in time to give warning of their probable effects upon the Lakes."
Anticipating the naysayers who would object to his proposal, he added, "Doubtless there would be failures and mistakes made; and many experiments and repeated observations would be necessary before the system could be made to work with perfection. But is not the object sought of sufficient importance to justify such a sacrifice?"
As it turned out, it was.
Only two months later, on Feb. 9, 1879, President Ulysses S. Grant signed a resolution to create a "national weather service."
Rather than simply the system that Lapham proposed near the Great Lakes, the newly formed department established 24 observation stations across the country and began sending telegrams less than a year after Lapham read that report in the newspaper.
The first forecast read, "High winds probable along the Lakes."
