History
In 1870 the Weather Bureau was established through a joint resolution of Congress signed by President Ulysses S. Grant with the mission "to provide for taking meteorological observations at the military stations in the interior of the continent and at other points in the States and Territories...and for giving notice on the northern (Great) Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic telegraph and marine signals, of the approach and force of storms." The agency was placed under the Secretary of War because "military discipline would probably secure the greatest promptness, regularity, and accuracy in the required observations." Within the Department of War, it was assigned to the U.S. Army Signal Corps under Brigadier General Albert J. Myer. General Myer gave the National Weather Service its first name: The Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce.
The agency first became a civilian enterprise in 1890, when it became part of the Department of Agriculture; it would later be moved to the Department of Commerce in 1940. The first Weather Bureau radiosonde was launched in Massachusetts in 1937, which went on to replace all routine aircraft observation within two years. The Bureau became part of the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA), when that agency was formed in August 1966. ESSA, in turn, was renamed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on 1 October 1970, with the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act. At this time, the Weather Bureau became the National Weather Service.
Read more about this topic: National Weather Service
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)