Timeline of Meteorology - 19th Century

19th Century

• 1800 - The Voltaic pile was the first modern electric battery, invented by Alessandro Volta, which led to later inventions like the telegraph.
• 1802-1803 - Luke Howard writes On the Modification of Clouds in which he assigns cloud types Latin names.
• 1804 - Sir John Leslie observes that a matte black surface radiates heat more effectively than a polished surface, suggesting the importance of black body radiation.
• 1806 - Francis Beaufort introduces his system for classifying wind speeds.
• 1808 - John Dalton defends caloric theory in A New System of Chemistry and describes how it combines with matter, especially gases; he proposes that the heat capacity of gases varies inversely with atomic weight.
• 1810 - Sir John Leslie freezes water to ice artificially.
• 1819 - Pierre Louis Dulong and Alexis Thérèse Petit give the Dulong-Petit law for the specific heat capacity of a crystal.
• 1820 - John Herapath develops some ideas in the kinetic theory of gases but mistakenly associates temperature with molecular momentum rather than kinetic energy; his work receives little attention other than from Joule.
• 1822 - Joseph Fourier formally introduces the use of dimensions for physical quantities in his Theorie Analytique de la Chaleur.
• 1824 - Sadi Carnot analyzes the efficiency of steam engines using caloric theory; he develops the notion of a reversible process and, in postulating that no such thing exists in nature, lays the foundation for the second law of thermodynamics.
• 1827 - Robert Brown discovers the Brownian motion of pollen and dye particles in water.
• 1832 - An electromagnetic telegraph was created by Baron Schilling.
• 1834 - Émile Clapeyron popularises Carnot's work through a graphical and analytic formulation.
• 1835 - Gaspard-Gustave Coriolis publishes theoretical discussions of machines with revolving parts and their efficiency, for example the efficiency of waterweels. At the end of the 19th century, meteorologists recognized that the way the Earth's rotation is taken into account in meteorology is analogous to what Coriolis discussed: an example of Coriolis Effect.
• 1836 - An American scientist, Dr. David Alter, invented the first known American electric telegraph in Elderton, Pennsylvania, one year before the much more popular Morse telegraph was invented.

• 1837 - Samuel Morse independently developed an electrical telegraph, an alternative design that was capable of transmitting over long distances using poor quality wire. His assistant, Alfred Vail, developed the Morse code signalling alphabet with Morse. The first electric telegram using this device was sent by Morse on May 24, 1844 from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. to the B&O Railroad "outer depot" in Baltimore and sent the message:

What hath God wrought

• 1839 - The first commercial electrical telegraph was constructed by Sir William Fothergill Cooke and entered use on the Great Western Railway. Cooke and Wheatstone patented it in May 1837 as an alarm system.
• 1840 - Elias Loomis the first person known to attempt to devise a theory on frontal zones, and prepared some of the first known weather maps. The idea of fronts did not catch on until expanded upon by the Norwegians in the years following World War I.
• 1843 - John James Waterston fully expounds the kinetic theory of gases, but is ridiculed and ignored.

- James Prescott Joule experimentally finds the mechanical equivalent of heat.

- Lucien Vidie invented the aneroid, from Greek meaning without liquid, barometer.

• 1846 - Cup anemometer invented by Dr. John Thomas Romney Robinson.
• 1847 - Hermann von Helmholtz publishes a definitive statement of the conservation of energy, the first law of thermodynamics.

- The Manchester Examiner newspaper organises the first weather reports collected by electrical means.

• 1848 - William Thomson extends the concept of absolute zero from gases to all substances.
• 1849 - Smithsonian Institution begins to establish an observation network across the United States, with 150 observers via telegraph, under the leadership of Joseph Henry.

- William John Macquorn Rankine calculates the correct relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature using his hypothesis of molecular vortices.

• 1850 - Rankine uses his vortex theory to establish accurate relationships between the temperature, pressure, and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid; he accurately predicts the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam will be negative.

- Rudolf Clausius gives the first clear joint statement of the first and second law of thermodynamics, abandoning the caloric theory, but preserving Carnot's principle.

• 1852 - Joule and Thomson demonstrate that a rapidly expanding gas cools, later named the Joule-Thomson effect.
• 1853 - The first International Meteorological Conference was held in Brussels at the initiative of Matthew Fontaine Maury, U.S. Navy, recommending standard observing times, methods of observation and logging format for weather reports from ships at sea.
• 1854 - The French astronomer Leverrier showed that a storm in the Black Sea could be followed across Europe and would have been predictable if the telegraph had been used. A service of storm forecasts was established a year later by the Paris Observatory.

- Rankine introduces his thermodynamic function, later identified as entropy.

• 1856 - William Ferrel publishes his essay on the winds and the currents of the oceans.
• 1859 - James Clerk Maxwell discovers the distribution law of molecular velocities.
• 1860 - Robert FitzRoy uses the new telegraph system to gather daily observations from across England and produces the first synoptic charts. He also coined the term "weather forecast" and his were the first ever daily weather forecasts to be published in this year.

- After establishment in 1849, 500 U.S. telegraph stations are now making weather observations and submitting them back to the Smithsonian Institution. The observations are later interrupted by the American Civil War.

• 1865 - Josef Loschmidt applies Maxwell's theory to estimate the number-density of molecules in gases, given observed gas viscosities.

- Manila Observatory founded in the Philippines.

• 1869 - Joseph Lockyer starts the scientific journal Nature.
• 1870 - Benito Vines becomes the head of the Meteorological Observatory at Belen in Havana, Cuba. He develops the first observing network in Cuba and creates some of the first hurricane-related forecasts.
• 1872 - Ludwig Boltzmann states the Boltzmann equation for the temporal development of distribution functions in phase space, and publishes his H-theorem.
• 1873 - International Meteorological Organization formed in Vienna.

- United States Army Signal Corp, forerunner of the National Weather Service, issues its first hurricane warning.

• 1876 - Josiah Willard Gibbs publishes the first of two papers (the second appears in 1878) which discuss phase equilibria, statistical ensembles, the free energy as the driving force behind chemical reactions, and chemical thermodynamics in general.
• 1881 - Finnish Meteorological Central Office was formed from part of Magnetic Observatory of Helsinki University.
• 1889 - India Meteorological Department established following tropical cyclone and monsoon related famines in the previous decades.
• 1890 - US Weather Bureau is created as a civilian operation under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
• 1892 - William Henry Dines invented another kind of anemometer, called the pressure-tube (Dines) anemometer. His device measured the difference in pressure arising from wind blowing in a tube versus that blowing across the tube.

- The first mention of the term "El Niño" to refer to climate occurs when Captain Camilo Carrilo told the Geographical society congress in Lima that Peruvian sailors named the warm northerly current "El Niño" because it was most noticeable around Christmas.

• 1896 - IMO publishes the first International cloud atlas.

- Svante Arrhenius proposes carbon dioxide as a key factor to explain the ice ages.

• 1898 - US Weather Bureau established a hurricane warning network at Kingston, Jamaica.